how come linspire can offer windows media and quicktime

[tikal26]

I was aske dan fgoogled it, but I can't fidn out why they are the ony one that are able to do it. I am wondering if anyone knows snce someone ask me and I doubt that it is because they were the only one that wanted to.

[milehigh]

Linspire was originally known as "Lindows". Microsoft sued them because it sounded too much like "Windows". I believe they acquired the right to distribute the Windows Media codecs as part of the settlement of that lawsuit. Someone correct me if I'm wrong...

[tikal26]

that sounds weird since it would mean that MS sued them and then in order to settle gave them the right to use their codecs :confused:

[DoctorMO]

Novel, IBM and Netscape all have those same rights... it's weird they want everyone to use the formats but won't make them open standards because that would mean we could distribute open source versions of these formats.

there are two parts, the first is helix player, I believe real will eventualy open source the codecs but it may take them some time and now sun might egg them on some what.

the ms codecs are at the moment limited because we have no open source variants, unlike mp3 which we have the lame encoder/decoder (we could distribute mp3 support without problems, but we're stupid) we would need to write our own codecs and I think we're up to version 3 or 4 in free software versions but much more money and developer time is required to support the format properly.

[az]

I am wondering if anyone knows snce someone ask me and I doubt that it is because they were the only one that wanted to.

They relicence them. They paid the royalties to be able to distribute them with their product. That's part of their business model. You pay for Linspire. You get freespire for free (!) and I cannot remember if freespire comes with those codecs.

The former CEO of Linspire was also the CEO of MP3.com which sells the mp3 codec licence - I guess linspire got a good deal on that licence.

[angrykeyboarder]

I was aske dan fgoogled it, but I can't fidn out why they are the ony one that are able to do it. I am wondering if anyone knows snce someone ask me and I doubt that it is because they were the only one that wanted to.

Since they're a commercial distribution, they can afford to. They pay for the rights.

Linspire is hardly alone, any number of other commercial distributions do the same thing.

[tikal26]

so why we ar enot able to get them. I don't want to start a flame war or anything like that, but if fesity is going to include a version of the binary drivers why can't we get an option so if you live in a place like the USA and I want to get the codec I could get the option to buy them.