Resisting the binary blob [LWN.net]

Resisting the binary blob

Posted Nov 14, 2006 18:52 UTC (Tue) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989)
Parent article: Resisting the binary blob

Shopping on Emperor Linux yesterday, I was encouraged that it is quite easy to design a system to use the Intel video chip.
Hopefully it gets increasingly easy to 'just say no' to the blob.

Responding to:
>so it is easy to imagine that the next wave of users will be less concerned - at the outset - about software freedom
My wife was given a complementary low-end iPod by her company, and was horribly dismayed that she couldn't just move her existing music (in whatever format RealPlayer uses) onto it.
She was sufficiently disappointed with the lock-in that I may get the gadget for a little mod-action. Mwahahahaha.
Sadly, too many sheep just line up for the shearing...

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Resisting the binary blob

Posted Nov 15, 2006 1:17 UTC (Wed) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link]

My wife was given a complementary low-end iPod by her company, and was horribly dismayed that she couldn't just move her existing music (in whatever format RealPlayer uses) onto it.
She was sufficiently disappointed with the lock-in that I may get the gadget for a little mod-action. Mwahahahaha.

You probably already know about this, but others might not:

Liberating iPods in Cambridge

um, you are already locked in by Real

Posted Nov 16, 2006 5:52 UTC (Thu) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link]

If you are using RealAudio format then you are already trapped by vendor lock-in, regardless of whether you use an iPod.

Using open file formats is far more important than what hardware/OS you pick. The latter trap can be replaced, the former trap (especially for lossy compression) is much more difficult to escape.

um, you are already locked in by Real

Posted Nov 16, 2006 9:19 UTC (Thu) by morhippo (subscriber, #334) [Link]

Unless the format is DRM restricted, I think mplayer should be able to recode the realaudio music into any free format.