The patent tax

The patent tax

This is part of the reason Eric and I suggested getting a bundle of
licenses for the crap we can't ship right now in the 64-bit transition
paper:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-...

Red Hat had mp3 playback support, and yanked it out of RH8. Decss to
play dvds has been out for years. This isn't primarily a technical
issue; we're _good_ at those.

Luckily, Microsoft's antitrust verdicts prevent it from suing Linux
directly, and proxies like SCO have blown up in its face. But it'll
still rattle its sabers at every opportunity and if it gets desperate
(the 64-bit transition is well underway, according to
http://www.amdcompare.com/prodoutlook/ all of AMD's server, mobile, and
desktop processors are now 64-bit) who knows what it'll do?

And the _real_ threat is Apple, which is happy to wrap stuff in DRM, sue
bloggers, sue sorensen for licensing its video codec patents to flash for
use on Linux. We can't just wait for Microsoft's incompetence to
overwhelm it or we'll all be using Macintoshes.

Ubuntu's been working on this for a while now:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FixBug1Via64BitDomination

The linspire/cannonical announcement was strategic, you know.

The FSF guys are, as always, trying to figure out whether they want
to be right or effective, and what their definition of success is...
http://www.libervis.com/

Although it would have been nice if Richard Stallman had bothered to READ
Eric's and my paper before declaring a jihad against it, but I suppose
that's asking a bit much from the man...

Rob

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