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My ConcernMy ConcernPosted Aug 31, 2006 17:44 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)In reply to: My Concern by emkey Parent article: Fedora Core to drop openmotif Your concern is misplaced. Red Hat is legally responsible for Fedora. If Red Hat ignores issues connected with patents and if it violates license conditions, it opens itself up to lawsuits. Currently Red Hat uses its revenue to pay hundreds of people to work on free/open source software. Would you prefer that they use that money instead for expensive court battles? Red Hat has a market capitalization of over four billion dollars; this makes them a lawsuit magnet. If they slip up, some enterprising lawyer can probably extract tens of millions of dollars. Red Hat's attorneys have advised the company not to include certain things that many of its users would like: NTFS support, MP3 encoding and decoding, support for playing "protected" DVDs. Those who don't like it can easily install all that stuff from elsewhere (e.g. livna) with a one-time step, using "yum update" afterwards to get the latest and greatest. It's win/win; if you want it, you can get it, and Red Hat can stay in business. Besides, hardly anything uses openmotif, and many things that do can work with lesstif. It's no big deal.
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My Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 19:23 UTC (Thu) by deniel (guest, #15492) [Link] > Besides, hardly anything uses openmotif, and many things that do can work> with lesstif. It's no big deal.
Inside the distribution itself maybe. But a lot of commercial applications
My Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 19:58 UTC (Thu) by kmccarty (subscriber, #12085) [Link] But a lot of commercial applications still require openmotif and lesstiff will simply don't work. I doubt that openmotif will be removed from RHEL anytime soon ... Since Fedora is the staging ground for RHEL, I don't see how it would be possible for OpenMotif to remain in the next release of RHEL. Given that, commercial applications will adjust pretty fast, I suspect. (Those few of them whose authors were dumb enough to dynamically link them against libXm.so instead of statically linking Motif into their shipped binaries in the first place.)
My Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 20:02 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
RHEL can very well include software not in Fedora and has been doing that already. Example: All of RHEL Extras.
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