Tuesday, January 16. 2007
Fluendo retracing the steps of Novell
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I totally agree! it's also sad to see that there are other Free Software "advocates" like Dave Neary (http://blogs.gnome.org/view/bolsh/2007/01/16/0) who actually think that Fluendo does good to Free Software by releasing this:
Au contraire, I think it's great that a company is offering for-money sale of commercial codecs - it's infinitely preferable to "free" codecs that people are downloading and using - often in non-compliance with the GPL ("but that's OK, we download them separately, and we're not redistributing the aggregate work").
Beside win32codecs being supported by more than just mplayer (xine, vlc, gstreamer itself), I think it's *way* more useful for Free Software the effort done by FFmpeg developers, who reimplemented a lot of codecs already, and now supports also VC-1 and WMV-3 as you noted.
You want to do good for Free Software? Support FFmpeg, rather than despise win32codes and support proprietary codecs of other sorts.
Au contraire, I think it's great that a company is offering for-money sale of commercial codecs - it's infinitely preferable to "free" codecs that people are downloading and using - often in non-compliance with the GPL ("but that's OK, we download them separately, and we're not redistributing the aggregate work").
Beside win32codecs being supported by more than just mplayer (xine, vlc, gstreamer itself), I think it's *way* more useful for Free Software the effort done by FFmpeg developers, who reimplemented a lot of codecs already, and now supports also VC-1 and WMV-3 as you noted.
You want to do good for Free Software? Support FFmpeg, rather than despise win32codes and support proprietary codecs of other sorts.
In the USA, we have software patents, and there is pretty much no hope of changing the law in the near future. That means we can't use ffmpeg-based anything in a commercial product without getting sued. Using only open formats is not an alternative - there is too much content in mpeg and wmv form. So given the choice of
1. not releasing a product;
2. using windows; and
3. using Linux with Fluendo codecs
you can see that #3 is the least bad alternative.
1. not releasing a product;
2. using windows; and
3. using Linux with Fluendo codecs
you can see that #3 is the least bad alternative.
Totally agree with Alex (#3). I wanted to sell a home theater computer with Linux in Australia. Without the Fluendo codecs I can't do sh...t. So, I choose the lest of evil and happily pay for their codecs.
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There is an open letter from Bruce Perens to Novell about the recent Microsoft deal that I haven’t seen before. You can (and should!) sign it here. (Thx Hanno) ...
Tracked: Jan 21, 14:32