thelinuxlink.net

Today I've been using both Banshee, on my Mac mini, and amaroK on my main workstation, both are great music players in my opinion, although Banshee is still a little buggy here and there, for example I find it to crash in a few cases, not very often, but a little.

One of the things Novell has been saying is that they wanted to provide legal MP3 playback for the customer of their upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, which is why they developed Banshee, so that without any fuss could link it to RealPlayer, which would provide codec support and stuff.

Right now, amaroK does have the engine plugin for RealPlayer, so I don't think the amaroK guys would have a problem with people linking amaroK, a Free program, to RealPlayer, a proprietary program, in order to legally play MP3s. Despite this, if distributions ship amaroK set up to use RealPlayer out of the box, they would violate the GPL, because they're linking Free code to non-Free code, a big example of this would be the whole GTK and Qt thing.

So I thought to myself today, should projects like amaroK start using the LGPL, which allows linking to non-Free code?
Wine used to use the BSD license, but after the whole WineX/Cedega thing, they were afraid of forking/fragmentation, so they switched to the LGPL, which still allows for makers of proprietary programs to link their code against the libraries the Wine project has created, case in point would be Google having just released Picasa for Linux using Wine.

So, let's say amaroK switched to the LGPL, then distributions that would want to provide legal MP3 playback, could configure the default package set of the installation process to include RealPlayer and tweak amaroK's default settings to use RealPlayer for playback of music files, that would allow for legal MP3 and AAC playback.
Of course, to do this, you would have to talk to Real a little bit, but I doubt they would have anything against more use of their application, and basically gratis advertising when you come down to it, heck to can download a RealPlayer with MP3 support for zero dollars.

Being a really really big fan of the Free Software philosophy, I know, this would a step in the other direction, but in this world of software patents, we are getting anywhere if we don't do anything, because the idea of software patents doesn't like the idea of Free Software, and of course vice versa.

Not entirely sure if giving Real Player framework status is such a good idea. As for Picassa, yes, it runs beautifully under WINE, but I really hope Google is just using WINE in order to test market Picassa on Linux. Google owes the community some code for everything they have accomplished using free software. Picassa would be a good start, because there is really no way to profit from it at this point honestly.

I'm more interested with tools licensed to convert non-DRM patented audio and video formats to non-patented formats legally. If this is a byproduct of using Real Player, I am fine with it, Otherwise, it just drives a wedge into multimedia playback.

metrolinux wrote:I'm more interested with tools licensed to convert non-DRM patented audio and video formats to non-patented formats legally.

Until the politicians get rid of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the DMCA, you can never do that legally, because in order to convert something that is DRMed into something that is not, you are bypassing copy-protection, and that is not allowed under the DMCA.

I mean stuff like Systm, TWiT, HackTV, etc. where the content is entirely free and is intended to be free, but shows up in encoding such as h264, quicktime, wmv, and other "patented" technology. If I download the file, regardless of whether the content creator cares or not, using tools to convert it to xvid for playback on my portable dvd player violates the patent if it involves taking apart the proprietary code. Regardless of whether the patent holders would actually sue me or not, I think it is jamming up innovation to keep this as a grey area that is never resolved. If Real Player would like to contribute to improving that situation for users, I would love the idea of allowing Real Player to become a framework. Otherwise, there is no benefit to putting them in a position to call the shots as to how amarok or any other linux players handle content.