It's legal in Europe. It's the US and Japan that have problems.

It's legal in Europe. It's the US and Japan that have problems.

Posted Jan 16, 2007 20:16 UTC (Tue) by gravious (guest, #7662)
In reply to: It's legal in Europe. It's the US and Japan that have problems. by dwheeler
Parent article: Fluendo announces Windows Media and MPEG codec support for Linux

fascinating - thanks... this puts esr's recent linspire shenanigans into context - this is as insightful and interesting a document as the original 'the cathedral and the bazaar', it may turn out to be just as seminal - in any case, by the authors' thinking we have but two years in which to win the desktop or lose it until the next big hardware transition. it is possible with the rise of consoles/set top boxes/media centers that consumer hardware may fragment in the near future or at least for a while in which case we may not have the case where either microsoft or apple get to dictate the face of computing and thus the world (i mean of course my world) for the next 20/30 years... interestingly i also saw the end of '07 as a point of congruence for the linux desktop - we have a config-less X.org shipping soon (7.3) we have the nouveau driver, we have beryl/compiz, we have the fluendo guys and mp3 (and just today Windows Media, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4!), we have avahi, we have a groovy wireless kernel maintainer so basically i predict that (my os of choice at the mo but surely all linux will benefit) ubuntu 7.10 will absolutely rock out of the box... of course the whole world domination 201 essay should be tempered with the usual refrain - those who are willing to sacrifice a few liberties will fall foul of the gnu tribe :)

thanks for the link dwheeler

ps: the killer 4GB+ app has to be the 3d web - think second life on steroids (streaming content within a 3d build-on-able shareable decentralized web 3.0), that much is obvious

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