On 26/08/2021 19.04, J Leslie Turriff wrote:
On 2021-08-26 11:56:40 Patrick Shanahan wrote:
|* J Leslie Turriff <jlturriff@mail.com> [08-26-21 12:54]: |> On 2021-08-15 15:52:29 Carlos E. R. wrote:
|> > |>>> packman is enabled, but did you do the packman switch?
|> |> Just out of curiosity, why do the maintainers persist in providing |> these broken packages in the official repositories, when only the ones |> in Packman work? Wouldn't it save them precious time and resources to |> just leave them out and let people install them directly from Packman |> without having to go through these arcane steps to get codecs to work? | |DRM
Not DRM. DRM is just one thing in many.
I don't understand that reasoning. If DRM prevents the maintainers from providing working codecs in the official repositories, rather than making openSuSE users take extra steps to remove their broken packages, they should just leave them out. Users who want working codecs could then install them from Packman without having to fiddle with YaST or zypper settings.
Legal reasons, explained in some details in the Wiki. Search for "restricted formats", I think is the name. It is simply illegal for a multinational company with concerns in the USA to distribute those privative and protected (like patented) software parts. Packman, being solely German and a volunteer concern, is not affected. It has been explained thousands of times over the decades of open/S[uU]SE existence.
This works for e.g. nVidia drivers; why is it different for codecs?
Different party sets the legal hurdle, and in this case, a legal bypass was found. It is the open source side which prohibits the privative nvidia kernel parts from being distributed by an open source company or group. So, we don't. They are distributed in source form, which is legal, and you, the user, compiles it in you your machine for your private use, which is also legal. But it is done automatically so that you may not notice. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from oS Leap 15.2 x86_64 (Minas Tirith))