-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Andreas Girardet wrote: ...
I would think that currently we are forcing the user to use illegal sources for such software. SUSE Linux 10.0 retail would be so much more usable if we would not need to do that and could just play DVD's and mp3's and other formats out of the box. We seem to not have a problem doing that with other commercial software, why not with that one.
Because other software like Adobe don't involve patent issues (because they own them).
I'm curious about Helix, though.
I don't want to push this into an endless thread but.. it might be even more complicated.
So, you want 100% "legal" MP3 and DVD players for SUSE Linux.
Would we want a closed source application ? I don't think so. I'm not a GPL freak but... what we
really want is an OpenSource implementation.
We already have those. The point is just that they don't pay for the right to use others' patents.
And even then, it's not really clear whether they are breaking patents and licenses or not. Software
patents are mostly a weapon to threaten others anyway (or a cash machine in some cases, e.g. Kodak
vs Sun).
But it also involves two things:
1) software patentability differs from one country to another: luckily, Europe is safe from those,
at least at the moment (don't mind what the European Patent Office is saying, they're illegal and
currently cannot be enforced)
2) depending on the OpenSource license you're using, patents are being taken into account or not
(GPL does not specifiy anything about software patents, although some BSD-like do (e.g. Apache
Software License 2))
The SUSE Linux retail price is already considered to be quite high in the community (yes, I know,
there are books etc..., I bought every single release since 5.0, I don't mind, but it's what I hear
a lot when talking to people) and adding an extra 40 USD/EUR for that.. I don't know.. not sure it's
the best option.
But yet, what about the online version ?
Buying the boxed set has been a barrier for quite a lot of people to use SUSE Linux, whereas other
distributions are available for immediate download (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora). IMHO, that part of
Novell's move to open up SUSE Linux will very likely be the most important in terms of SUSE Linux'
acceptance and spread amongst users.
What you are saying is: "well, if they want multimedia support out-of-the-box, they should buy the
boxed set" ... ?
What's the legal situation in terms of copyright and patents with the current option of providing
those "multimedia packs" ?
Or would you want to have Novell pay codec licensing fees to, amongst others... Microsoft (to
include WMA codecs), and Novell in turn make the users pay for it ? I'm not sure I'd like to pay
Microsoft a few bucks when I buy my SUSE Linux set ;)
cheers
- --
-o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
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