On 9/28/22 08:21, Neal Gompa wrote: > On Wed, Sep 28, 2022 at 1:15 PM Michael J Gruber <m...@fedoraproject.org> > wrote: >> >> As Fedora users and contributors, we profit a lot from everything that >> RedHat provides to the Fedora project, be it infra, people-power or >> "leverage" (talking to vendors etc.). In turn, RedHat can expect a certain >> amount of understanding from "us" for their business interests, which >> include legal liabilities, of course. >> >> Understanding is helped greatly by communication, though. Legal answers such >> as "We can not" do not further this understanding, and "We can not and we >> can not tell you why" is not much better, but these are the typical answer >> we get, not even with a "sorry, but we can't". Obviously, these legal >> questions are difficult to explain, but it can't be true that each such case >> is under a "gag order". This non-transparency is orthogonal to our first F >> and hurts all efforts to increase the number of contributors. >> >> Now, I don't expect the communication issue to be resolved any time soon. >> Therefore it's important to work on the other major friction point: How >> difficult do we make it for users/contributors to get the missing bits that >> they need or can (because they are no distributors, in a different >> jurisdiction etc.)? >> >> rpmfusion/gstreamer is a prime example of how things can work flawlessly, >> and takes into account all interests. >> >> ffmpeg is a prime example of "in your face", of course, and I'm happy to >> read that it may get resolved. >> > > Let's talk for a moment here about this. I'm going to give you some > "inside baseball" (or at least as much as I can). I can tell you up > front that ffmpeg in Fedora is *entirely* my fault. > > I spent many years tirelessly trying to come up with a solution to > bring FFmpeg into Fedora. It started from the moment we got approval > to introduce MPEG1 and MPEG2 codecs into Fedora. I cannot overstate > how much back-and-forth with Red Hat Legal it took to figure it out. > Over the last few years, more and more codecs got gradually approved, > until we got to a point that enough codecs were approved that it made > sense to finally produce a package to introduce. I had been trying to > come up with a stripped FFmpeg source tree to deliver and was not > succeeding until Andreas Scheider came up with the scripts to do it > properly. That breakthrough allowed us to bring FFmpeg into Fedora as > ffmpeg-free. > > It was my choice to be quiet about its introduction, because I was > being verbally and emotionally abused by other community members over > it and I didn't want to invite more by making a big announcement like > we did for mp3. At one point, I got so stressed over it that I became > physically ill for weeks. > > Do I regret this work? No. I still firmly believe this is going to > improve the usefulness of baseline Fedora and expand the pressure to > improve and prioritize Free Software in the Linux space. Do I want to > do something like this again? I don't know. It really sucked and in > the end all I got was hate for it. I want to make Fedora the best > Linux distribution out there, but I also don't want to create a > situation where all Fedora users and contributors are in legal > jeopardy. > >> The other big issue are our hobbled sources: We cannot store some original >> sources in the look-aside cache, obviously. But packages such as openssl do >> not even specify a hash nor an url for the un-hobbled sources. This makes it >> unncessarily difficult to verify that our openssl package has indeed been >> built against against the hobbled version of the original sources - for a >> package like openssl this really is a trust issue (and might even violate >> our packaging guidelines, but I'm not a lawyer...). >> > > I'm (personally, though IANAL) of the opinion that the hobbling of > crypto libraries is probably no longer necessary and can be retired > entirely. The method of producing the stripped sources is > reproducible, so from our guidelines perspective, it's fine. But I do > think it's probably obsolete, and I hope Red Hat Legal concurs. > >> As a side effect, it makes it unnecesarily difficult to rebuild the package >> locally (though it does not effectively inhibit it either, of course; it is >> not an "effective measure" for that cause). I do understand that providing a >> functional link can be construed to be "redistribution", but in the context >> of a spec file, a comment really is a reference to the "source of the >> source", without which we cannot even claim to distribute the hobbled >> version legally (and without which we have no trust chain). >> >> Note that depending on the legal outcome mesa might have to go the hobbled >> route, too: simply disabling the codecs in %build does not change anything >> about redistributing the source. > > That will depend on how much codec detail exists in the Mesa codebase. > I would guess not enough to matter, but IANAL. > > Here's something of a drop-kick for you though: those > hardware-accelerated codecs that Dave Airlie disabled from Mesa > weren't being used by *anything* in Fedora anyway. Not GStreamer, not > FFmpeg, not Chromium, etc. We've been extremely careful to ensure we > don't provide a "completed puzzle" as it were for those codecs. In > practice, you are getting *nothing* from those codecs anyway. Fedora > has only provided working hardware acceleration for unencumbered > codecs. That list is expanding all the time, but for now this means > you're basically only going to see MPEG1, MPEG2, VP8, VP9, and AV1 > acceleration. Everything else is currently off the table.
Could Cisco somehow be convinced to provide hardware acceleration as part of OpenH264? -- Sincerely, Demi Marie Obenour (she/her/hers) _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
