the libdvdcss issue

[Andreas Thienemann]

Hello Rex,

On Tue, 18 Nov 2008, Rex Dieter wrote:

[Not shipping something in order to prevent people from comitting legally 
questionable acts in their locale]

> I am swayed by that argument, but this is a special case.
 
> I'm still very concerned over issues around
> 1.  fedora being able to refer to rpmfusion

Fedora is not able to refer to ATRpms or Dag either IIRC. Yet they have 
quite a lot of users, right?

> or the more general:
> 2.  journalists/websites cannot mention rpmfusion either
> or even

Same as above.

> 3.  losing rpmfusion contributors

That is the only valid reason of not shipping it.

> (wishlist/todo:  create a FAQ on the wiki for this very issue, so we 
> don't need to rehash/rediscuss it every few weeks). :)

Problem is, it's not question which can be answered in a definite way. As 
I mentioned earlier on IRC:

Whether libdvdcss is acceptable or not depends on your point of view and 
the way you're rating the software we ship.

There are people who think that libdvdcss is evil and the rest we ship is 
okay.

I'm seeing things a bit different: slmodem which I'm maintaining has some 
proprietary stuff needed to drive the modem I bought. This is delivered as 
a i386 shared object file with some pieces of GPL code around it.
This is evil.

libdvdcss on the other hand is a clean, suprisingly small and 
best of all completely open source library implementing a (admittedly bad) 
algorithm I need in order to watch many of my bought and paid for movies.

I'd rate this piece of software much higher then libdvdcss.

The fact that my politicians decided that it's their job to keep me from 
watching my bought DVDs is a shame.

Firebombing might solve that problem. Not shipping libdvdcss because of 
some american and german politicians is not the right solution.


regards,
 andreas