18. Freedom and myths

Our friends, the software patents, are imposing known restrictions to what a Linux distro can ship with. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is having its own contribution, so that the only legal solution (especially in the United States) to play proprietary media formats or zone-coded DVDs is to use commercial software on top of your free of charge Linux distro.

GNU/Linux (the way Richard Stallman likes to call it) is primarily about freedom, so that a Linux user should ideally refrain from playing MP3, MPEG, AVI, WMV or WMA files or streams. He or she should also not be using closed-source software such as Acrobat Reader, Flash, RealPlayer, or maybe Opera too.

I fully agree that everyone should be encoding in OGG instead of MP3, but what to do when this is not the case? Is everybody having such a "high conscience" to only accept the utmost expression of the freedom, and to simply refuse to watch the Web clips on sites like CNN? (Swfdec started to be able to play YouTube videos recently.)

There are not so many heroes in the real life. Probably 90% of the individual users are using what should be called "illegal codecs" (some small distros that are not backed by any company can even provide them out of the box), and some corporate users (and some of the individuals too!) have chosen to pay for the commercially-licensed players offered by Mandriva, Turbolinux, and Linspire.

Freedom is too a matter of choice. Practical choice, not revolutionary programs. This makes the "purified" gNewSense distro sponsored by FSF a political product, and nothing more. Fortunately, the future Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon will feature a new flavour of uncompromising freedom that renders gNewSense pointless, for it «takes an ultra-orthodox view of licensing: no firmware, drivers, imagery, sounds, applications, or other content which do not include full source materials and come with full rights of modification, remixing and redistribution».

At the opposite end of the rainbow, another myth appeared. Click'N'Run, the service provided by Linspire, is supposed to offer soon a universal repository, starting with Debian, Fedora Core, Freespire, Linspire, openSUSE, and Ubuntu. Both free and commercial packages will be offered.

While providing packages for the whole Universe is not a trivial task at all, and one may wonder whether Linspire has the required manpower to ensure a proper QA so that updating from CNR doesn't break the system, there are some high expectations that will not be met.

A good deal of the users who currently use third-party repositories like the Penguin Liberation Front are cherishing the unexplained belief that CNR will allow them to get rid of all the annoyances they were having, by providing them with packages not in the original distro of their choice.

Sure thing, this may happen, but for a price! What is currently patent-encumbered will fall under the commercial offerings umbrella: the "harmless" packages will be free, but the others might cost you fees like $49.95. Many users are not conscious of that.

As the MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3) patent status is the most fuzzy of all, it is also the audio format that offers you more than a single choice. There are even two free ways to play MP3 legally.

The first one comes from Mandriva: all their distros are MP3-aware out of the box, even the Free download editions. As part of a commercial deal, they can offer you legally-licensed MP3 decodecs for free.

The second choice is from Fluendo, whose Web Shop not only offers paying decodecs for Dolby AC3, MPEG4 Part 2 Video, MPEG2 Video, Windows Media Video and Windows Media Audio (the complete set of playback plugins for Gstreamer is priced EUR 28), but the MP3 plugin is free of charge!

I bet everyone is willing to pay royalties for a mathematical method or for a file format. Feel free to do it.

There is one more thing that might make the defenders of freedom feel uneasy. Fedora had the intention to provide Totem with a <;;a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureCodecBuddy">CodecBuddy feature that would inform the users that restricted formats can not be played, and to direct them to the legal choices provided by Fluendo. As Red Hat and the Fedora project are American subjects. they can not afford to be accused of contributory infringement of any kind. See a possible screenshot here.

And still, the MP3 playback plugin can be downloaded for free from Fluendo.

What is defective with this approach? What would be extremely annoying to me (should CodecBuddy behave as described) is to see how Fedora, traditionally a freedom-oriented, neutral distro, is going to become nothing more than a Fluendo Webshop front-end! I can predict how some FSF-enrolled people will stop using Fedora the next day.