On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 00:31, Scott <scottro@nyc.rr.com> wrote:
> This seems nitpicking, but it's the sort of thing that will simply
> aggravate the inexperienced user. As Jeff has written somewhere, the
> trend these days is to feed the LCD (lowest common denominator), and if
> you're going to do it, and offer this as a legitimate Windows
> replacement, it has to be done better.
That is true... and by the way, it's Prague, not Poland. and Prague
is lovely... very lovely. And it's true what they say about the Czech
girls... :-)
There is a huge difference between the distros that ship those
licensed codecs and the ones that do not ship them. That being, the
ones that DO ship them are niche and clone distros that were created
to fill a need that exists but are not built to support a company or
to have any sort of logevity outside the interest of the people who
create them.
For the ones that DON'T ship those codecs (and other software) its a
risk/cost issue. The licensing to distribute can cost a fair amount
of money (especially when you give your OS away for free) and in many
cases the licensing is restrictive to distribution anyway... so in
reality, the distros that DO include those codecs are violating the
owner's rights, and rail against licensing as you might, it's no
different than the offence the FOSS community takes when a company
takes linux, puts it on their products and sells those products for a
profit, without giving anything back and ignoring the provisions of
the GPL about supplying source code.
The risk is too great when you're an actual company looking to make
money and survive in the long term. Sure, they may well not care if
Ubuntu included the QT codecs, then again, the MIGHT not be OK with
that, and the result could be a legal nightmare. So the alternative
is to point out the fact that we can't provide you the ability to play
QT movies out of the box because Apple are a bunch of asshats, but,
oh, by the way, here's how YOU can install it yourself, wink wink...
then the risk passes on to the individual user...
Anyway, enough of this... I'm on holiday in Prague...
Jeff
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