I'm punting this over to the marketing side. The consensus on #fedora- docs is this: a) Fedora has not done a very good job of loudly advertising why we don't distribute certain codecs, although we do spend a lot of time addressing the topic in other ways. b) The complaint about multimedia is in every poorly researched review. c) This is the latest stick to beat Fedora with. d) An official rebuttal/comment on the situation might help. Any ideas on this? I appreciate Greg's approach of pushing the situation back on other people. Our only failing is probably in not being loud and present enough with our comments/rebuttals. Maybe the desktop background by default should be an explanation of "why no MP3 support". I don't mind including something useful in the release notes, and in fact had intended to with an update. This bug report approaches making a few good points, buried as it is in so much bile. I'll likely ignore updating this bug except to CLOSE it when the time comes. I've used up the ounce of civility I brewed for this situation on this wannabe-customer. -------- Forwarded Message -------- From: bugzilla(a)redhat.com To: kwade(a)redhat.com Subject: [Bug 163675] mpeg situation not explained in documentation Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 14:33:48 -0400 Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional comments should be made in the comments box of this bug report. Summary: mpeg situation not explained in documentation https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=163675 ------- Additional Comments From redhat(a)chaos.demon.nl 2005-07-21 14:33 EST ------- What a cop out. First of all: just because your customers aren't paying you doesn't mean you can treat them however you like. Secondly: it would have been no trouble at all to include one tiny paragraph in the release notes explaining all this. You make it sound like it would have cost a team of writers months to do this. Thirdly: this is not some obscure little "non-free, closed-source, illegal and patent-infringing" piece of software. Missing MPEg audio playback functionality is a sizable drawback for many people. Even Windows plays back MP3 files by default. So do almost all other Linux distributions. It is something people rightly expect, and at the very least it should be explained to them (by the creators of the product, not by having them perform Google queries) that it is missing, and why. Lastly: don't blame me for this for not filing a bug about it during the test process. As if nobody could have figured this out otherwise. And as if the situation hasn't been the same for many previous versions. What un unworthy response... Pity... -- Karsten Wade, RHCE * Sr. Tech Writer * http://people.redhat.com/kwade/ gpg fingerprint: 2680 DBFD D968 3141 0115 5F1B D992 0E06 AD0E 0C41 Red Hat SELinux Guide http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/selinux-guide/ -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list(a)redhat.com http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list

We reorganized the release notes to be more friendly for a default Firefox page. Not all the changes are in FC4, but the basic idea was to add a "what's new" section and make the table of contents more visible to show what information is in the release notes. The "what's new" contains links to useful information, and would be a natural place to put such a note.

I'm punting this over to the marketing side. The consensus on #fedora- docs is this: a) Fedora has not done a very good job of loudly advertising why we don't distribute certain codecs, although we do spend a lot of time addressing the topic in other ways. b) The complaint about multimedia is in every poorly researched review. c) This is the latest stick to beat Fedora with. d) An official rebuttal/comment on the situation might help. Any ideas on this?

Any ideas ?