Alan Cox alan@redhat.com:
At least one is "maybe they don't want to be Fedora Extras" and another in several cases is that they choose to carry material that might not be allowed in the USA, just the free world. As a US corporation Red Hat is subject to US law.
These both seem like readily solvable problems to me.
If you look at http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/mega-merge.php, you'll see that this group describes itself as "The Red Hat/Fedora authoritative packager list". That sure sounds to me as though they would welcome official status if offered.
As for the DECSS problem, everybody understands it and we already have a workaround via the existence of livna.org.
I suggest that Fedora make the following offer to this group: Fedora will put these repositories in the distributed apt.sources and collectively designate them as Fedora Extras, on the following conditions:
(1) Software compromised for IP reasons must be exiled to livna.org Repository keepers must agree to comply with a ban list compiled by Red Hat.
(2) RPMs must meet Fedora QA standards. Repository maintainers must expect their submission, test and build procedures to be audited, and will be dropped from the list of authoritative repositories if they fail to meet standards.
I doubt you'd get any pushback on these requirements. And the cost of QA-monitoring these repositories would undoubtedly be lower than the cost of building and maintaining one big repository of your own. You'd win fairly big on the download costs alone.