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Revision as of 15:17, 26 April 2016 by Pfrields (talk | contribs)

Why can I not download the RPM?

There is a subset of RPM packages that, due to various legal reasons, Fedora cannot distribute, even though we may build them inside of Fedora. At the time of this writing, an example is the OpenH264 codec. Cisco has paid for a patent grant for people to use this codec. However, one of the terms of the patent grant is that Cisco must distribute the binaries.

Fedora has worked with Cisco to allow us to build and sign the RPMs, thus insuring integrity for Fedora users. We then ship Cisco the binary RPMs, which they publish. We reference their binary distribution in a disabled repository that end users are free to enable. This allows users to legally get the codec, verify the integrity of the content, and receive packages that integrate nicely into a Fedora system.