On May 05, 07 14:52:30 -0500, Rajko M. wrote:
On Saturday 05 May 2007 09:58, Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Saturday 05 May 2007 07:52, Rajko M. wrote:
It could be easier for new users with interest in multimedia ...
True. Our Multimedia situation is sad.
1) is it possible that if retail box would offer MM and maybe few other goodies for extra price that it would be much more popular?
We did the calculations a few times during the last years. the basic patent licenses involved increase the retail price by ca 10..20$ -- a tricky mixture of flat fees, per unit fees and other things.
2) Is it so expensive or legally impossible to have media applications that work out of the box?
Both :-) The legal implications are complex. E.g. patent licenses usually require the code to be closed soure. Btw. Fluendo did a cool trick to license a binary and provide open source, though.
The present situation is in a long run bad for both financial or adoption goals.
indeed.
It's an old story. It's not impossible, but it would require the same kind of licensing agreements that Microsoft and Apple have with the pertinent licensing organization (Fraunhofer, e.g.). For whatever reason, Novell does not want to get involved in mingling proprietary software with their Open Source release.
Some parts of Novell don't, others (including myself do). But whenever direct costs and legal risks are involved, but no immediate business need is at hand, we lack good arguements why we should feed the ... how do you call them ... 'patent-trolls'?. cheers, Jw. -- o \ Juergen Weigert paint it green! __/ _=======.=======_ <V> | jw@suse.de wide open suse_/ _---|____________\/ \ | 0911 74053-508 (tm)__/ (____/ /\ (/) | __________________________/ _/ \_ vim:set sw=2 wm=8 SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nuernberg) "Oral agreements are worth about as much as the paper they are written on." --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org