On Monday 17 Aug 2009, steve wrote:
> [snip]
> Since Fedora sticks to free software and freedom principle, you might
> find some 'basic' features missing -- such as support for mp3 and
> other patent encumbered media formats
Nothing to do with Fedora per se, but aren't patent-ridden softwares
like MP3 decoders only a problem in countries that have software
patents? Perhaps it's time to start telling the distributors to have a
"US-only" distribution that excludes patent-ridden software, and provide
all software by default to the "Rest of the World". A question like,
"Do you live in a backward country that has software patents?" at the
start of the install would go a long way in establishing what people are
missing ;)
BTW, I was pleasantly surprised the other day to find MP3 players, etc.
in the main Debian repositories, from where they had been missing
earlier:
# apt-cache policy mpg123
mpg123:
Version table:
1.7.2-3 0
990 http://ftp.XX.debian.org testing/main Packages
# apt-cache policy mplayer
mplayer:
Version table:
1.0~rc3+svn20090405-1 0
990 http://ftp.XX.debian.org testing/main Packages
Surprised because earlier Debian also had a no-MP3 policy and you had to
go to debian-multimedia.org to get MP3-related packages. It changed
sometime in the past 6 months or so, perhaps some Debian contributor can
tell us when and why.
Regards,
-- Raju
--
Raj Mathur [email protected] http://kandalaya.org/
GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F
PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves
--
http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
