By Rebecca Sobol
November 7, 2007
When an article titled
Codec Buddy in Fedora
8 was posted to LWN earlier this week it generated quite a bit
comment... 33 comments posted as of this writing. The LWN thread caused
another
long string of comments, this time
on the
Fedora
advisory board mailing list, in which proprietary software is compared
to heroin. Seth Vidal says in the initial posting: "
I don't care
about needles and I don't want to ween the addicts off."
Codecs remain a sticky issue because they are patent encumbered. Windows
users are used to paying for an operating system, and often codec licensing
is included in the cost. When they download an MP3 file they expect it to
play. On Linux systems in the United States, and anywhere else that
recognizes the codec patents, MP3s don't play and it makes users very
grumpy.
Codec Buddy attempts to educate Fedora users about the patent encumbered
nature of codecs and then allows the user to pay for license through Fluendo, a company located in Barcelona,
Spain. According to a Fluendo press
release: "The Fluendo codecs plug directly into the popular and
widely used GStreamer multimedia framework available on all the major
GNU/Linux and Solaris systems. Users of GNU/Linux and Solaris operating
systems have previously lacked solutions which enabled them to license and
use popular media formats such as Windows Media, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 in
accordance with the laws of their country. Through Fluendo's agreements
with Microsoft and MPEG LA such a solution is now available."
The Fedora advisory board has since been updated with some relevant conclusions.
Support for current iPod devices can be provided by Fedora - getting around
Apple's obfuscation is not seen as a DMCA violation. The rules on linking
to encumbered software have also been loosened: "This means that we
can put a page up on the fedoraproject.org wiki, which carefully explains
that there is an optional addon repository called Livna, which contains
packages that for a variety of reasons, are not included in the normal
Fedora repositories. We should not specify these reasons, and if someone
asserted their patents against something in Livna, we would need to take
the page down."
Multimedia is important to providing a popular desktop. For many users it
is the most important part of the desktop. A Linux desktop will not become
wildly popular until it becomes easy to share music and videos with
friends. Education is great, teaching people about the values of freedom
with respect to software is a worthy goal. Not everyone wants to learn
that lesson, especially when they already have gigabytes of music in MP3
format.
Your editor has over 100 gigabytes of music in flac format (thanks to LWN editor
Forrest Cook) and 0 MP3s. Unfortunately there aren't many devices that
will play flac files. Salespeople in stores that sell iPods and the like
have no idea what a flac is, and don't care in my experience. There's a
long road ahead until free formats are more popular than the formats that are
currently more readily available.
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