As many have pointed out before, there are alot of packages and codecs that fit nicely for the home user that are not included with Fedora. This is for many reasons and most of them have something to do with laywers.
My suggestion is a Fedora WWW site that is outside the US as a single point of reference for all these different applications and codecs. Even if provides decent links to the various sites around the world would be better than what many new users have to go through to find that codec for MP3's or play DVD's.
Even if the website were outside the US, Fedora as a US organization cannot officially condone the illegal use of software. Private repositories for these packages are easily discovered for those who live somewhere without such laws or for those willing to personally risk infringing use.
Yes, it's perhaps stupid that certain corporations han maintain a licensing stranglehold on certain popular codecs (even if they did come up with them in the first place), and prevent them from being used with GPL software.
The very simple difference is that, because Windows is not zero-price, Microsoft can absorb all of the licensing costs to these other companies neccessary to legally include their algorithms in the packaged product. Apple can (and does) do the same thing.
A company could set themselves up selling properly licensed software for mp3 and dvd use, but they could not use GPL code to create their software without some interesting shenanigans, because the license will prohibit the end result from being GPLd.
The DVD issue is really annoying, but I just rip all my CDs to .ogg and avoid the MP3 fiasco entirely. For a user without a pre-existing collection, it's easy to use the included tools in Fedora to do this. As an added benefit, not having any mp3s on your system makes you less likely to be targeted as an alleged music pirate by large overzealous acronyms.
