Fedora - DELL ?

[Les Mikesell]

Andy Green wrote:

>>> I betcha Dell has a CFO too. And, I bet they don't ship something with
>>> mp3 playback loaded and ready to use in it, as shipped. Wait and see
>>> what happens. :) Ric
>>
>> Did you happen to not notice that virtually every Dell currently 
>> shipped has mp3 playback loaded - also WMA and most would have dvd 
>> too.  It's Linux that brings a problem into this picture.
> 
> No.  It is patent law that brings that problem into the picture.

Perhaps, but what is your solution?  The law is what it is until it 
changes.  And it is probably not going to change in such a way that 
makes it impossible to control distribution of new inventions.

> While it is protected by law (and all the penalties the state can apply) 
> then the patented content in proprietary codecs give proprietary 
> software a reason to go on.  You are ragging on the wrong people if you 
> think that is Linux or Fedora's fault.  The problem is patent law.

I'm confused about what 'problem' you mean.  I'll agree that patent law 
is flawed in a lot of ways.  I don't agree that it should be impossible 
to control distribution of your own work in ways that don't interfere 
with other's rights to do the same.  The problem I see is that even if 
you are willing to meet the licensing terms of all the components you 
want to have, no one is allowed to combine them for you if any part is 
covered by the GPL and any other part has different restrictions.

> In 2010 IIRC Linux will have zero problem with MP3 playback out of the 
> box, because the Frauenhofer patent will have expired [1].  But it will 
> continue to have problems playing back $RANDOM_CURRENT_CONTENT because 
> it will be encoded in some new patented format that neither expired nor 
> appears in Linspire's catalogue.  You can probably play it anyway thanks 
> to mplayer, but that's not the point.

How is this going to change?  I expect encodings to continue to improve 
and for people to continue to need a way to fund the development work. 
The GPL just doesn't provide a good model to fairly share those costs 
and it doesn't co-exist well with the schemes that do.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com