thelinuxlink.net

Tell me again why I should dislike Freespire (not that anyone actually ever told me that, but I had this preconceived notion that it was lame - maybe that was just Linspire). Probably had a lot to do with the whole Click N Run for $ thing, but if I understand the deal with Freespire correctly, you can apt-get their open source stuff.

I'm only about a half hour into trying this out, but is this not the distro you'd give the newbie?

Simple graphical 1 disk fast install. It has handled MP3s, Flash and even a Quicktime video out of the box. And on top of that, it has handled them better than Ubuntu (after Easy Ubuntu) so far.

The boot manager actually loaded perfectly (left other distros/ testing kernels intact), the file manager mounted all my partitions without a catch, with no permission issues (OK it may not be the safest).

It's KDE, it's fast, it looks nice.... stop me before I start liking it even more.

The reason I don't like Linspire and Freespire is because they just pee on the GPL, sure I use NVIDIA's stupid proprietary driver, but I think the GPL should be respected.

Also, I don't like how Kevin Carmony says that all distros but Linspire is not something the average Joe user could use and that Linux without any proprietary software is useless and places Linux where it was five years ago, it really pisses me off.

And finally I don't like distros that deliberately practice bad security habits.

Tsuroerusu wrote: Also, I don't like how Kevin Carmony says that all distros but Linspire is something the average Joe user could use, it really pisses me off.

I know! Linspire isn't something the average Joe can use, either.

Okay, cool.

I guess Freespire's thing is the "choice" blurb -

Freespire is available in two versions:
* The regular, complete version includes legally-licensed, 3rd party codecs, drivers and software, to offer better hardware, file type, and multimedia support. Freespire includes turn-key, out-of-the-box support for MP3, Windows Media, QuickTime, Java, Flash, Real, ATI drivers, nVidia drivers, proprietary WiFi drivers, modem drivers, fonts, and so on.
* The OSS Edition uses only open source software.

Couple of what seem to be somewhat positive Linux community reviews:
Eweek - http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT3239087426.html
Linux World - http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/07/26/1836241

This is a pretty decent thread on LWN.net about Freespire , nvidia, the GPL and such.
http://lwn.net/Articles/194633/

TankCatNinjaFish wrote:

Tsuroerusu wrote: Also, I don't like how Kevin Carmony says that all distros but Linspire is something the average Joe user could use, it really pisses me off.

I know! Linspire isn't something the average Joe can use, either.

Please excuse me, that was a typing error of mine, I edited it so please re-read, I was really tired when I posted that reply so I didn't see the error.

I'm fairly new to this argument (GPL, proprietary stuff, etc.). Unless I'm missing somehting, how does a distro like Slackware play MP3s out of the box? I see that Suse has gotten around it by making their own decoder with Helix, and I know from experience Ubuntu, Fedora and others don't, anyway...wondering. Thanks

johnnywtllts wrote:I'm fairly new to this argument (GPL, proprietary stuff, etc.). Unless I'm missing somehting, how does a distro like Slackware play MP3s out of the box?

I don't know Slackware's package sets very well, so I can't tell you, we need mr. Fessenden on that one I think.
I would guess that it may include the library called mad, and that works great, but is not legal to distribute in the US, since Europe doesn't yet have software patents, I can legally distribute it to people who don't live in a country with software patents.

johnnywtllts wrote:I see that Suse has gotten around it by making their own decoder with Helix,

SLED 10 includes Banshee which can use RealPlayer as it's playback backend, and RealPlayer has legal support for MP3 playback.

johnnywtllts wrote:and I know from experience Ubuntu, Fedora and others don't, anyway...wondering. Thanks

Patents, patents and more patents, it's all because of patents dude.

I spoke to some SUSE guys and they said that to legally distribute an MP3 encoder/decoder in the US, you either pay 60,000 dollars per year, or 5 bucks per unit. Both are not an option for pretty much every free software project.

So in reality, the only way to legally play MP3 files, in the US, is to use a piece of proprietary software, prime example being RealPlayer to either directly play the files or function as backend.

Also, say I own the patent for MP3 and I give you some GPL software that plays MP3, then I automatically have granted you permission to use my patent under the terms of the GPL, and I can give that to to others as well.
And this clearly conflicts with US patent law.

Some distros choose to just ignore this and just include the mad library and MP3 works great, and others can't afford to take that risk, especially the big ones like SUSE, being owned by Novell and Fedora being strongly connected to Red Hat.


The GPL also prohibits linking non-free code to free code, prime example of this being NVIDIA's graphics driver. That is why both Kororaa and Novell received angry letters from kernel hackers who felt Kororaa and Novell were infringing their copyrights.
This is also why you rarely see a proprietary KDE program, because in order to make such a thing you have to pay for a commercial license for Qt. GTK you can freely use, because it's licensed under the LGPL, which does allow proprietary linking, and so is OpenOffice so you can make this "OpenOffice.org Lookout"-alternative to Microsoft Outlook that everybody whines about OpenOffice not having.

I do use NVIDIA's driver, but I also think that the GPL should be respected, it's a very simple license that gives you a lot of rights by only requiring that you give back, and respect the licensing terms, it's not a hard thing to do, unless patents are involved.

I spoke to some SUSE guys and they said that to legally distribute an MP3 encoder/decoder in the US, you either pay 60,000 dollars per year, or 5 bucks per unit. Both are not an option for pretty much every free software project.

that just blows me away - I cannot believe everyone pays this fricken ransom when there is a better option like ogg available. I mean WTF. I will continue to promote ogg whenever I can.

glad I convert my cds all to ogg format.

jsusanka wrote:

I spoke to some SUSE guys and they said that to legally distribute an MP3 encoder/decoder in the US, you either pay 60,000 dollars per year, or 5 bucks per unit. Both are not an option for pretty much every free software project.

that just blows me away - I cannot believe everyone pays this fricken ransom when there is a better option like ogg available. I mean WTF. I will continue to promote ogg whenever I can.

glad I convert my cds all to ogg format.

Lotta vendor lock-in man, when MP3 was fairly new, Fraunhofer practically gave it away, and then when it became popular they took the patent hand-cuffs and locked people's balls tightly up.

The whole media codec thing can get very confusing. Slackware includes libmad which is licensed under the GPL for non-commercial use. The libmad website offers a commercial version of libmad for a cost.

So now does this relate to the gpl? Well, you can dual license software it seems. Trolltech does it with qt. QT is released under the gpl for the non-commercial, oss version.

The novell guys were saying that the problem with media players is that they are all licensed under the GPL, which poses a problem for all non-gpl codecs; legally no dsitro can distribute non-gpl'd codecs with the players. Where mp3 falls into this I do not know; again, like qt libmad is under gpl for non-commercial use.

Banshee is not under the gpl so they can include the software in the non-free repository. Non-free being non-gpl; not necessarily commercial or closed. Since there are absolutely no restrictions on Banshee you can link any codecs you want. At least that is my understanding.

So it comes down to it being that since slackware can include qt, then; because it is under the same type of license, they can include libmad. Could they get in trouble? I am not sure. The responsibility of the license I suspect falls on the user then, just as it does with qt.

Why do other distros not include mad? Perhaps they do not want any confusion or do not want to skirt the grey area.

dann wrote:The whole media codec thing can get very confusing. Slackware includes libmad which is licensed under the GPL for non-commercial use. The libmad website offers a commercial version of libmad for a cost.

First of all, Dann, I'd like you clarify "non-commercial use", because you can absolutely sell GPLed software, it's a mistake to classify proprietary use as the only kind of commercial use of free software.

Also, if you make a program using Trolltech's Qt, you can absolutely sell it as long as the program is GPLed, if you use Qt under the BSD license you could release it under say the BSD license (Kubuntu's crappy, I'm sorry but this UI is just a disaster, Adept package manager is released under the BSD license, as the author uses Qt under the QPL he can do so).

dann wrote:So now does this relate to the gpl? Well, you can dual license software it seems. Trolltech does it with qt. QT is released under the gpl for the non-commercial, oss version.

The copyright holder can dual-license his software, in fact, Qt is actually triple-licensed (QPL/GPL/Commercial)!

dann wrote:The novell guys were saying that the problem with media players is that they are all licensed under the GPL, which poses a problem for all non-gpl codecs; legally no dsitro can distribute non-gpl'd codecs with the players. Where mp3 falls into this I do not know; again, like qt libmad is under gpl for non-commercial use.

Banshee is not under the gpl so they can include the software in the non-free repository. Non-free being non-gpl; not necessarily commercial or closed. Since there are absolutely no restrictions on Banshee you can link any codecs you want. At least that is my understanding.

Now you're leaving the entire patent minefield outta the conversation, but let's for the sake of argument say that software patents don't exist for a few minutes. Again, you can't link non-free code to GPLed code, my prime example is that you can't make a proprietary program with Trolltech's Qt, since Trolltech has released Qt under two free/open licenses (GPL and QPL), you use it as GPLed software if you wanna write say a GPLed app for KDE, how about a free software Photoshop clone? If you wanna write a KDE that's licensed under the BSD license you need to use Qt under the QPL, as the GPL doesn't allow a "derivative work" to be released under a different license.

So, if no country had software patents and Novell wanted to include as good multimedia playback in SLED as possible, then they could take all the free software codecs, or free software implementations, they can find like a52dec, faad, faac, mad, etc. etc. and use those, and there wouldn't be any problem because you're not linking non-free code to GPLed code, you're in pretty much every case, linking free code to free code, and that's perfectly legit in the eye of the GPL.

The Windows Media codecs would not fit into this picture, because that's an issue of copyright and not patents in this case where we leave software patents outta the conversation. And those are proprietary anyway, as they're actually Windows binary .dll files that MPlayer and Xine can use because they use a little DLL loader from the Wine project, which is a very cleaver trick.

dann wrote:So it comes down to it being that since slackware can include qt, then; because it is under the same type of license, they can include libmad. Could they get in trouble? I am not sure. The responsibility of the license I suspect falls on the user then, just as it does with qt.

Oh dude, if Fraunhofer wanted to, they could sue Patrick Volkerding outta existence (This is me exaggerating a little in the moment of paranoia).
Because by distributing the mad library, he's basically infringing on their patents, plus the GPL will automatically give permission for anybody receiving the software to use those patents under GPL, although this last thing is kinda eliminated as Fraunhofer don't do the GPL MP3 plugin of any kind so they are the only ones who can grant permissions to use the technology that their patents cover. Also the GPL is incompatible with the license you can get from Fraunhofer, after you've paid the price I mentioned in an earlier post, because it says "free use" and Fraunhofer restricts usage.

dann wrote:Why do other distros not include mad? Perhaps they do not want any confusion or do not want to skirt the grey area.

They do it to avoid being sued into oblivion by Fraunhofer.

Well, what it boils down to is that if there can be any judgement upon a technology which would inhibit the application of the rights the gpl offers, then said technology should not be licensed under the gpl. I guess it depends on how far you want to take that. While Underbit, like Fluendo, may have licensed the technology from Fruenhofer, it is possible that this license could be revoked in the future or contested, thus resulting in a judgement that would prevent the software from being released under the gpl. Therefore, the GPL recommends that, in such cases, said software is not released under the gpl.

I consulted the mp3licensing.com site and Underbit, which produces libmad, is not on the licensee list. I'm not sure how they are getting away with not being sued for patent violation. While endusers can use the mp3 technology, the technology must be acquired by a properly licensed program.

Licensing is not required for mp3 if the product, the resulting mp3 file be it sold or streamed, does not net the producer in $100,000 US gross annually.

So if you develop an app that uses mp3, though, you might need to license the technology. For instance, if you develop and distribute a game that uses mp3 you must license mp3 if you distribute more than 5000 copies. Does that mean sell? I don't know. If you give it away, maybe you still need to license.

With all this mess, I can understand why distro pull mp3 support. In a sense slackware would be violating patent law by distributing libmad since Underbit does not seem to have a valid mp3 license from Fruenhofer, even though libmad is released under gpl. Maybe libmad does not violate the patent, but due to the untest circumstances; they gpl would recommend you err on the side of caution.

Perhaps we should try to get someone from Underbit on?



By commercial software I should have said closed software. I did not mean to imply that gpl software cannot be commercial software.

But in the case of libmad, you cannot produce mp3 files for commercial sale using mad, you have to license the commercial version. That is what I meant by "non-commercial" use in that case. Not that you cannot sell gpl'ed software.

just wait 5 more years and we can freely use mp3's unfortunately that still leaves us with many other patented softwares.

jsusanka wrote:

I spoke to some SUSE guys and they said that to legally distribute an MP3 encoder/decoder in the US, you either pay 60,000 dollars per year, or 5 bucks per unit. Both are not an option for pretty much every free software project.

that just blows me away - I cannot believe everyone pays this fricken ransom when there is a better option like ogg available. I mean WTF. I will continue to promote ogg whenever I can.

glad I convert my cds all to ogg format.

I read this and thought I'd try converting some of my mpeg videos (wink wink) to theora, which uses ogg audio. The quality of the theoras were the same, but they were about half the size!! And the ogg I created from my CD's were also smaller and had slightly better quality. good stuff.

TankCatNinjaFish wrote:I read this and thought I'd try converting some of my mpeg videos (wink wink) to theora, which uses ogg audio. The quality of the theoras were the same, but they were about half the size!! And the ogg I created from my CD's were also smaller and had slightly better quality. good stuff.

Yeah I ripped one DVD to theora at real high quality and was amazed by the file size compared to the quality. Unfortunately thoggen seems to crash mid-way through encoding the DVD and the preview version of K3B that allows DVD ripping doesn't even allow me to use Theora. Does anyone know of any good DVD ripping programs? (don't worry, I own the DVD )