Debian and patents

[stmiller]

I recently ran across this blog post of a VLC developer about Debian and the removal of the x264 package.

http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2007/05/25/Bored-with-Debian-x264-patents

I see why this sort of thing turns people away from Debian. (And perhaps attracts others to Debian?)

[izanbardprince]

Well, what angers me the most is when they cripple a program like this, then you have the package in the repo that can be installed in 3 seconds flat, but you have to grab the source code and build it yourself anyway, then because the official package in the repo will conflict with an unofficial packaging you could stick in a repo of your own for others, you really can't distribute it.

[kerry_s]

i still use debian, but than i haven't been using vlc either, i been using mplayer+codecs. the vlc plugins are just not good and the video quality is just getting worse and worse, choppy, stuttery, pixelated,etc...

[izanbardprince]

Debian is ridiculous as far as their rabidness against proprietary anything.

Debian: "Sure we'll throw in a VLC package, but it absolutely can't support DVD's, WMA, WMV, X264, MP3, AAC, or DIVX."

In other words, Debian is hell bent on having 100 media players in it's repos that can't play anything other than Vorbis or Theora.

[dca]

It's all good, though. Debian is still a very good base (exceptional) to build a different distro on top of to get what you want a'la Mepis & Ubuntu....

[CREEPING DEATH]

Um, Etch supports .mp3 out of the box...

CD

[izanbardprince]

Um, Etch supports .mp3 out of the box...

CD

Wow, someone should fire off an email and tell them "Just type in 'mp3' and 'patent' in Google", and do the names Thomson, Fruanhofer, and Microsoft ring any bells?

I mean, I'm all about free/open source software, but there are fanatics out there that think they're going to change the world, overnight, if they run unaccelerated 2d GUI's on an operating system that doesn't support any multimedia framework and can't utilize a modem or a wifi card, I mean the last time that an entirely free and open system was feasible was back in the 80's when computers were primitive and the most "multimedia" you'd encounter is the PC speaker making beeps.

Anyway, for some reason, Mark Shuttleworth is throwing a bone to these people and releasing a version of Ubuntu as I described above starting with 7.10, I always thought the biggest difference between Ubuntu and Debian is that Ubuntu tends to have less of a bug up their collective butt about non-free drivers and binary blobs in general.

[stmiller]

Yes I think the entire software patents thing over codecs is way out of control. FFMEG has a compile option to enable a GPL version, which is what VLC uses in their releases. (Something like ./configure -gpl or something like that.) You would think totally GPL software like VLC would be okay by the Debian police.

The funny thing is that Gentoo includes everything, all packages unrestricted, and Gentoo is a 100% free/open distro like Debian. And Gentoo did not have to rename Firefox- it remains called 'Firefox.' Gentoo doesn't mind the Mozilla license. (Nor does Ubuntu, I assume.)

[init1]

Wow, someone should fire off an email and tell them "Just type in 'mp3' and 'patent' in Google", and do the names Thomson, Fruanhofer, and Microsoft ring any bells?

I mean, I'm all about free/open source software, but there are fanatics out there that think they're going to change the world, overnight, if they run unaccelerated 2d GUI's on an operating system that doesn't support any multimedia framework and can't utilize a modem or a wifi card, I mean the last time that an entirely free and open system was feasible was back in the 80's when computers were primitive and the most "multimedia" you'd encounter is the PC speaker making beeps.

Anyway, for some reason, Mark Shuttleworth is throwing a bone to these people and releasing a version of Ubuntu as I described above starting with 7.10, I always thought the biggest difference between Ubuntu and Debian is that Ubuntu tends to have less of a bug up their collective butt about non-free drivers and binary blobs in general.

Seriously. I don't care what it takes for me to get wireless in Ubuntu. I went through *** trying to get it to work, and I still have issues. That's why I have Mepis on my HD. It has the wireless drivers I need. And a WPA gui that actually works.

[benuski]

I mean, I'm all about free/open source software, but there are fanatics out there that think they're going to change the world, overnight, if they run unaccelerated 2d GUI's on an operating system that doesn't support any multimedia framework and can't utilize a modem or a wifi card, I mean the last time that an entirely free and open system was feasible was back in the 80's when computers were primitive and the most "multimedia" you'd encounter is the PC speaker making beeps.

Anyway, for some reason, Mark Shuttleworth is throwing a bone to these people and releasing a version of Ubuntu as I described above starting with 7.10, I always thought the biggest difference between Ubuntu and Debian is that Ubuntu tends to have less of a bug up their collective butt about non-free drivers and binary blobs in general.

How else will you ever get any change except through taking a stand, one small step at a time? If there are never those "fanatics" out there, there would never be any impetus for change. If Debian, Fedora, and other distrubutions didn't have "a bug up their...butt" about these sorts of things, nothing would ever change.

What drove me to Debian was not that it is a pure, no non-free software distrubution; in the main repository, it is, but there are contrib and non-free. Why I went to Debian from Ubuntu is that I can have the choice to install the non-free software, whereas in Ubuntu, by default, there is non-free stuff installed. It may seem like a small difference, but in my eyes, its a big one.

[ZipoTe]

Debian is ridiculous as far as their rabidness against proprietary anything.

Debian: "Sure we'll throw in a VLC package, but it absolutely can't support DVD's, WMA, WMV, X264, MP3, AAC, or DIVX."

In other words, Debian is hell bent on having 100 media players in it's repos that can't play anything other than Vorbis or Theora.

It's just another philosophy, and is not ridiculous. Using debian makes me feel protected because i know a great (non propietary :-P) community is behind, and i know this community won't fail me. Maybe their philosophy is strict but it works and that's the point. If we could define freedom with an image,it should be:

http://images.barrapunto.com/topics/topicdebian.gif