Are the 'Bad' Components Moral? Naughty Linux?

[dpaint4]

This has been on my mind for a couple months on and off and I figured it might be the right thing to do to put it to you guys here in the cafe.

The thing is, Ubuntu is slick. I'm loving Dapper. I tried Breezy liked it, but it wasn't quite ready for all that I wanted to do (I'm demanding about specific audio codecs [mostly different versions of Vorbis] living peacefully together on the same OS and being easily replaced, removed, updated, and modified). So I held my breath and went back to Windows (home of Foobar2000 [which doesn't do so great in Wine] for a while. I was looking forward to Dapper, and when it came out, I downloaded it and I had a lot of confidence, so I installed cleanly, and left nothing of my previous OS on the drive of my primary machine.

But! There is always the point I get to on a Linux machine where things are *almost* exactly how I want them, and then the last step is to download some grey-market application that installs all the codecs and applications that I'm not 'supposed to' have. (EasyUbuntu this time, which was awsome.)

So what does that mean? Am I a 'bad' Linux user or something? Is this somehow illegal?

The funny thing is, many of said codecs, in the Windows world are widely regarded as open source, and very easily aquired. Like LAME, and XviD, for instance. To a Windows user, both are shining examples of Open Source achieving absolute perfection over the closed alternative.

Yet in Linux they're kind of tricky to get at and when you do it you're pretty sure you're not supposed to be doing it.

It seems like if I was the perfect Linux/Ubuntu user I'd be compressing all my movies to Ogg Theora (which I actually kind of like - but consider too painfully slow for practical use [3-4 fps on my machine]), using only generic graphics card drivers, and never viewing Flash content online, among other things. Kind of like being Vegan.

Can you guys clearly state your views on the degree to which using this stuff that Windows users take for granted is 'wrong' or 'okay' or 'good' either from a moral, personal, or legal standpoint? I'm interested in all three perspectives because I haven't made up my mind about any of them.

[reacocard]

I personally think it's ok as long as you have paid for the rights to use them in some form, e.g. owning a copy of windows. It's probably still not strictly legal, but at least you do have some form of licence to use them.

[ohgod]

The "Bad" components are not immoral or anything (not to me anyway). Software is ususally in the ugly/bad category because of license & legailty questions. For example, the unrar program is freeware, but it is not open source and therefore doesn't get included in the distro. A different example is libdvdcss, which is open source but is of questionable legailty in certain countries.

So this is oversimplifying, but it seems like some stuff is left out to keep the distro as free & open as possible, while other stuff is left out to protect it from legal attacks.

[az]

Can you guys clearly state your views on the degree to which using this stuff that Windows users take for granted is 'wrong' or 'okay' or 'good' either from a moral, personal, or legal standpoint? I'm interested in all three perspectives because I haven't made up my mind about any of them.

So, we are talking about coedcs only, right?

You are entitled to use lame or any other mp3 cedec for personal use. The US patent on it only prevents it from being distributed by the linux distributer, but not from you using it for yourself.

I think the patent sucks. I think people should be more aware of free formats so they don't get trapped into having to use one particular format or brand of hardware.

As for the bundle of other codecs, well the free-libre implementations of them are there and are improving constantly. The problem is that the w32 codecs package works better. Those codecs are stolen, though. They are not licenced for redistribution. But my reason for not using them is that they are not free-libe open source software. For all I know, they are spyware - and there is no way for me to know that they are not.

The patent on reading encrypted DVDs is a pain. To tell you the truth, I don't know if it is in effect in Canada.

I am pretty sure that the majority of people feel that they payed for the priviledge of decoding their encrypted DVDs when they payed for either the DVD drive or the DVD itself. I tend to agree with that (what I rebel I am!) and I hardly doubt that someone is going to bust down my door because my daughter is watching Heffalump on my Ubuntu computer.

What is a shame is that a public library would have trouble migrating their public internet access boxes to Ubuntu because of the licencing for the common codecs you need for browsing the internet.

[AndyCooll]

Following on from Azz'z post. I suppose it depends on where you stand in terms of philosophy, conscience and practicality.

You'd need to find out exactly where your country stands with regards to using certain codecs etc, indeed in some countries even ripping a CD is theoretically illegal (here in the UK for instance).

You can be fairly sure though that if you use Ubuntu Linux "out of the box" you'll be on the "good" side. However is this version practical? And the problem here is that for many folk this isn't since this means mp3's etc won't play. You could get around this and still stay on the good side and pay for a distro which comes with mp3 compatibility, Linspire (for instance).

Whether you should even use mp3 or Flash is a conscience matter. For instance using Flash is perfectly legal, but some folk frown upon its use because it is proprietary. There are open-source alternatives but they just don't work as well.

In my case I have to admit that I tend to end up using many of these for practicality reasons. I'd prefer to use the open-source versions of codecs, Flash and Java for instance but have never got them to work satisfactorily and then end up falling back on the proprietary versions.

:cool: