gorkon wrote:I listened to the new LUGRadio today and they had ESR on it. I happen to totally agree with him. Zealotry will KILL Linux. Zealotry that prevents people from getting MP3 support working easily or from getting Firefox in Debian instead of Ice Weasel. I LIKE his idea of throwing a few bucks at SuSE, Ubuntu or who ever and then them supporting a nice easy way of getting all of the codecs working. That will work for Mom and Dad. For us, we'll go get the code like we always have. It's a Win/Win in my book.
Does that mean we don't need OGG? No. OGG and Theora should still be pushed, but support people through their transition to OGG and also allow them to get to the content they want to hear.
We all know of the patent issues with MP3, but the fact is it would cost us alot of time and possibly money to convert the existing data we have. Hey I thought of something....maybe one of the OGG supporting companies should offer a service of ripping/converting your CD to OGG? I know, someone will say the RIAA....jingle jangle all around the RIAA....this is fair use.
Anyway, that's how I feel. Let's hear what you think.
Novell is already providing MP3 playback out of the box in SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 and once Real releases the new version of RealPlayer that supports Windows Media it will be available as well.
So in SLED 10 you've got legal MP3 support, WMA/WMV, OGG Vorbis/Theora, and maybe AAC I don't remember if that is in there.
If you use the DVD to install SUSE Linux 10.1 you will get some non-free stuff (Including RealPlayer) without user intervention, or tell the installer, when installing from CDs, to include "add-on products" from "seperate media" also known as the non-oss disc (CD6).
This installs RealPlayer and sets Amarok (KDE) or Banshee (GNOME) up to use it's Helix framework to play stuff, and that provides legal MP3 playback out of the box.
I think in openSUSE 10.2 this will only be applicable to Banshee in GNOME because the SUSE developers have concluded that making Amarok, a GPLed program, use a proprietary framework (Helix in itself is not proprietary, but in this case it's available in a proprietary program) for playback is a GPL violation.
Personally I don't think it is because you're not "linking" any free software against any non-free software as far as I know, you just using a feature of Amarok that utilizes some non-free software.
As far as Debian forking Firefox, Thunderbird and the Mozilla Suite, my opinion on this is this. I think it's really good to have a distribution that people can just modify to their heart's content and not have to worry about trademarks other than the distribution's own, hopefully obvious, trademarks. Debian has always been this kind of distribution, it's only as they have added the "non-free" repository that they are no longer recommended by the FSF, because the FSF feels that in this way they promote non-free software, albeit in a small context.
Debian has never really been something your average Joe user would or could use, as it's not really that user friendly, try telling mr. Joe about apt-get and sources.list
Because of this, I don't really have a problem with what Debian is doing, in fact I think it's a good thing for Debian per se, because of it's long standing ideals and goals.
Linc has referred to this as being
"picky about what software you can install", but I see it more as just having some ideals that you stand by, while it may be inconvienient to some people.
Having said this, I think it's not a good idea to replace Firefox with IceWeasel in a distro such as Mandriva, SUSE, Fedora or Ubuntu, as they pretty much all try to cater to new users (Fedora seems to have this prioritized slightly lower than the rest have) and new users will be left confused about where the browser is.
If I don't like the way a distribution does something, I just don't use that distribution, it's as simple as that really. A good example of me personally, is Ubuntu. It doesn't have any management tools (Bootloader configuration, Firewall configuration, NFS configuration ...) in addition to GNOME's own tools, the big one being X.Org configuration. Because of this, whenever I try Ubuntu I feel somewhat limited in terms of what I can do, because I don't like editing configuration files unless I have to. This is one of several reasons why I don't use Ubuntu, and if you don't like what Debian does, you could either just use Ubuntu, install Firefox manually, use IceWeasel or just use a different distribution.
One of the reasons I really like OpenBSD is that I don't have to worry about locking down the system besides using good passwords and that very obvious stuff. Apache is run chrooted out of the box, and the overall system is locked down by default. In FreeBSD I have to remember all that before I port forward port 80 on my router so there's public access to a web server I may be running.
