Re: very rough pre-gep tentative new modules list

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Tue, 2002-09-17 at 10:12, Alan Cox wrote:
> > pie-in-the-sky ideas, but they are not reasonable :) Note also that it's
> > not just not US shippable; most likely much of it will not be shippable
> > in much of Europe soon as well, as a result of the pending
> > implementations of the EU Copyright Directive, which prohibits
> > circumvention devices.
> 
> Thats a different set of pieces (CSS). The US side of it means we probably
> cannot ship mpeg video, mpeg audio, mp3 audio, windows audio, or ac56.

I'll worry about those when there is a prosecution or legal claim made
against any of them. I'm not yet aware of any.[3]

More generally, though, and completely tegardless of the exact set of
pieces not available, the legal codec issue is a problem that at some
point GNOME[1] must deal with- if we're ever going to compete with XP
and OS/X instead of win95 and OS9, we[2]'re going to need mp3, dvd, wma,
etc. support. Which means either figuring out a debian-style tiered
mirror system, or biting the bullet and fighting it legally. This may
not be something we're capable of tackling in a 2.2 timeframe, which
/might/ be a reason to punt xine and totem from Desktop for now. But
that's clearly something we need to discuss.

Luis

[1]not to mention the various distributors of GNOME and the 'UNIX
desktop.'
[2]Linux users as a whole, not just GNOME.
[3]And please spare us the whole 'the US is evil' rant; we've heard it
before and it's really not terribly germane, given the global CSS issues
we must address.