Brian: > The Free software movement doesn't believe in software patents.
Untrue. It would be better to say that they do not support them. I'd be interested to hear how far "the free software movment doesn't believe in software patents" argument gets anyone in court. :) The GPL license is quite clear that IP protected code should not be included in GPL/LGPL licensed projects. > I can understand paying for authoring tools. But playback is free on > Linux, Windows and Mac.. (Pretty much all standards). With Windows and Mac, you pay for the licenses when you pay for the OS. Most free operating system distros do not ship IP protected media decoders or encoders. Any OS that ships them "for free" is very generous to be paying the license fee and not passing the charge to the end-user. The licensing fees for some popular formats are quite expensive. I have been working with Fluendo to make sure that plugins to enable media encoding and decoding are available to Solaris users for a modest fee. I hope that MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 plugins will be available there for Solaris in the not-too-distant future. > I need video > codecs, because tech companies are putting out technical videos, and > there is no format standard. (You name it Flash, Mindows Media, > Quicktime, Divx, etc). Developers are used to certain things from their > platforms in this day and age. Multiple format video playback happens to > be one of those things. Ubuntu, which is closer to Solaris in desktop > market share than Windows and MacOSX have figured out a way to do it, we > should at least investigate what and how they are doing it... (I will > try to contribute more feedback in the install community, but I just > started using Ubuntu so my knowledge is limited.). I agree that we need to figure out a way to do it. I also agree it is important. I also think we need to find the most appropriate legal way to do things. I'm aware Sun's legal department is working on this. > I think that the argument that Solaris should do something just because > someone else does it is not a strong argument. Especially when there > are legal considerations. > > I beg to differ. You have to wonder why they are doing it, and see if > those reasons apply to you. e.g. Sun strongly embracing x86 commodity > servers and OSes. Price/performance was a huge factor that couldn't be > ignored. Yes, Sun is currently working on Project Indiana to address many of these issues, including media related issues. Brian _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
