On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 10:37 +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
IMHO the right solution for this problem would be to ban
autodownloader and
everything using it (or worse, requiring original proprietary and charged-for
game CDs) from the distribution. I see that tool as both an ugly kludge and a
way to circumvent Fedora's licensing requirements. It also sends the entirely
wrong message to upstream projects: before, it was "If you want to have your
game in Fedora, you have to fix your licensing.", now it's "We'll just
hack
around it with autodownloader and ignore our Fedora Objectives entirely.". :-(
In addition, for data files where the license allows non-commercial
redistribution, it would IMHO be more user-friendly to have a fully-playable
package in rpmfusion non-free than an autodownloader hack in Fedora.
I am one of the few and the proud who went out and bought the Linux
edition of Quake 3 when it came out. I rather like being able to play it
again. Good luck getting the original binaries to work on a modern
system...
What are the licensing implications of this? Hell if I know. The game
engine is GPL. The game content I bought legitimately. Dare I draw the
parallel to web browsers, which are used to view all kinds of content
that *isn't* licensed properly? I suddenly feel a strong sense of deja
vu...