On Wed, 1 Aug 2007 16:44:48 -0400, you wrote: >The Free software movement doesn't believe in software patents.
Not true. The free software movement believes that software patents are bad for a variety of reasons, but still acknowledges that (at least in the US) they are legally valid. It is for this reason that Red Hat has software patents, see http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html As such you will find most developers of software that is known to be risky (ie. video codecs) are outside of the US. >I can understand paying for authoring tools. But playback is free on Linux, Playback is free on Linux because it is developed outside of the US, and so far the patent holders have not been able to extend their reach. >Windows and Mac.. (Pretty much all standards). 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 Ubuntu, and more importantly Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) are NOT American. They are based in Europe, which means so far they can get away with doing things that an American based company cannot. Red Hat has had their lawyers look into this issue with regards to the Fedora Project and it is quite clear that not only can Red Hat and/or Fedora not include this questionable software in their distributions but even linking to it could cause legal problems in the US. This would also apply to Sun given that they are also an American company. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
