Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> P.S. Vitaly, your suggestions to enable rpmfusion are not helpful for
> inexperienced Fedora users, who expect multimedia to work
> out-of-the-box. Common multimedia needs like "play a video" absolutely
> need to work without rpmfusion, and we need Fedora developers testing
> this to make sure it works.
It is common knowledge that Fedora is/was effectively useless for anything
remotely related to multimedia without RPM Fusion packages. It had been like
that for years and users have learned to deal with it. Your efforts to
change that are well meaning, but in the end I do not agree that the
compromises you had to go through to make this (mostly) work within the
unreasonable restrictions of US law are ultimately worth it.
Those "make multimedia work out of the box" efforts have involved so far:
* accepting to have the dual-licensed OpenH264 shipped to users under the
proprietary binary license (it is only under a Free copyright license if it
is built from the BSD-licensed source code by a third (non-Cisco) party and
shipped by that third party without going through Cisco, but then you
explicitly have no patent license, which is why Fedora does not do that; RPM
Fusion can, if something insists on using OpenH264 instead of the better
FFmpeg and libx264 codecs, and in fact, chromium-freeworld and
qt5-qtwebengine-freeworld ship a bundled BSD-licensed OpenH264),
* making a special arrangement with Cisco to ship OpenH264 (built in Koji,
but shipped only through Cisco) through a dedicated repository, enabling
that third-party, non-Fedora repository by default, and even allowing weak
dependencies to drag in the package from the third-party repository by
default (which is otherwise a big no-no),
* shipping a non-compliant incomplete implementation of AAC in Fedora
(avoiding parts of the standard with still active patents),
* doing the above based on an AAC implementation with a GPL-incompatible
license, even considered non-Free by Debian,
* allowing browsers to download proprietary DRM blobs with one click, in
direct contradiction to Fedora policies explicitly forbidding such downloads
of proprietary executable code in applications,
* and now shipping an incomplete version of FFmpeg in Fedora, even with at
least two non-upstream and non-upstreamable hacks (the one to dlopen
OpenH264 instead of linking it – FFmpeg upstream hates runtime dlopen –, and
the one to allow FDK-AAC without --enable-nonfree, so that it can even be
used together with --enable-gpl, in blatant violation of the upstream
licenses, which are incompatible with each other, as confirmed by the FSF).
All these compromises:
* violate the core Freedom principle of Fedora, and
* lead to a degraded user experience compared to just installing fully
functional multimedia codecs under Free copyright licenses from RPM Fusion.
Also because non-upstream hacks such as relying on OpenH264 (dlopened, even)
for FFmpeg (instead of the superior and default native FFmpeg H.264 decoder
and libx264 H.264 encoder) confuse the heck out of applications such as
Firefox, as evidenced by this thread.
There has also been little to no communication or coordination with RPM
Fusion on these points. In some cases, concerns raised by RPM Fusion
developers have been deliberately ignored (e.g., in the AAC case). In
others, one RPM Fusion maintainer was contacted, but neither the Fedora
maintainer nor the RPM Fusion maintainer has discussed the issue on the RPM
Fusion mailing list (where such a plan ought to be discussed IMHO) or even
with other RPM Fusion maintainers (e.g., in the FFmpeg case). This leaves a
bitter feeling with people involved with RPM Fusion that you are
deliberately sabotaging their years-long hard work, even if that was never
the intention.
Kevin Kofler
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