Debian status

> How is Debian' situation different from Fedora's ?

Debian provides an OpenH264 source package that produces 2 separate binary packages:

* libopenh264-8 - this is built from the openh264 source
* libopenh264-cisco8 - this downloads a pre-built binary from Cisco

If you are in a jurisdiction where software patents are recognised, and you have not are not licensed to use h264, you can use the libopenh264-cisco8 package. If you are in a jurisdiction without patent concern, you can use the libopenh264-8 package. This appears to be against Debian's patent policy, I have no insight into the maintainer and FTP masters' decisions there.

Debian is not relying on Fedora to host an APT repository here, instead it is directly downloading the shared library from Cisco (and verifying it against a known hash). So Debian was not relying on any manual request to get Cisco to update a repository.