WTH is wrong with public perception [LWN.net]

WTH is wrong with public perception

Posted Nov 8, 2007 15:51 UTC (Thu) by Tet (subscriber, #5433)
In reply to: WTH is wrong with public perception by DonDiego
Parent article: Codecs cause Fedora pain

What I cannot understand is that supposedly clueful people like LWN editors write articles that make it sound as if free software codec support did not exist.

No, that's not what the article says at all. It says that there aren't legally available[1] means of playing encumbered codecs that don't involve licensing the format, not that there aren't free software solutions. Please don't try and link together the two concepts. They're unrelated.

[1] Yes, I'm well aware that in some juristictions, that's not true. But Fedora is distributed worldwide, and that means they can't afford to take the risk that they'll be sued in, say, the USA, just because the software they're distributing (or even just linking to) happens to be legal in some parts of Europe.

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WTH is wrong with public perception

Posted Nov 8, 2007 16:14 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

By this rationale they should be avoiding shipping openssl and all that 
depends upon it, including openssh. In some jurisdictions using encryption 
is a very serious crime.

The real reason ffmpeg isn't available for non-patent-encumbered 
jurisdictions is that the US is a patent-encumbered one and the majority 
of Fedora devs (in the US) reasonably don't see the point in adding 
infrastructure for the other jurisdictions that they can't use.

(also it can sometimes be hard to figure out what those jurisdictions are, 
not least thanks to the EU's ridiculously obfuscatory approach to 
lawmaking.)

WTH is wrong with public perception

Posted Nov 8, 2007 16:44 UTC (Thu) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141) [Link]

I'm not linking the two concepts, I'm complaining that the article muddies the distinction!
The problem is *not* a technical one, it is a political decision made by some distributions,
most notably Fedora / Red Hat.

Quoting from the article:

  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.

This is obviously total nonsense.  MP3s play perfectly, it's just that some distros based in
the USA shy away from including MP3 decoders.

Plus, end-users have never been in any kind of legal risk!  This gets misrepresented all the
time.