On Monday 07 May 2007 08:46, Juergen Weigert wrote:
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.
The immediate business need was/is Dell and number of other, including small businesses that can't do much with operating system that doesn't support multimedia. I had few installations that people abandoned because they rather pay for antivirus and firewall software ($70), and have music, video and games. It would be completely different if they would have to pay the same price for the same MM offer and much more programs. For missing games it is clear that good gaming computer cost more than gaming console and couple of games, but missing ability to see web page content makes people feel like they have faulty software and if they have to choose between two they go back to what they are used to. -- Regards, Rajko. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org