Sat 24 Dec 2005
Thanks Thomas for the early Christmas present. I am impressed with Fluendo’s navigation of the market and had said to myself since the first time I heard about them, these guys are on to something. They are targeting specific problem areas within the Free and Open Source communities and solving them in legal ways. I mean they are effectively balancing the needs of our community along with popular culture all the while treading lightly through an area rife with patent mine fields. This in the end I believe will be a much more effective approach than just ignoring patents even if we do feel software patents are wrong.
I for one can’t wait to pay Fluendo for the rights to use WMV, MOV, RM, etc. Why is this? Because first of all I am a pragmatist. CNN, NYTimes, and most of the other sites that are moving to showing more video and doing so in a format that I currently can not legally view. Sitting here saying that sucks and is unjust isn’t going to get them to change to Ogg Vorbis and Theora. Paying a company who I know has the community’s best interests in mind and who I feel are talented enough to mount an effective campaign for change will help. Giving a little before you get is a fine trade-off for me.
Sure anyone can get the codecs for “free” right now. Download mplayer someone says. This only alienates us by putting us further and further into our own corner. It also breeds laziness. Why should we come up with a creative solution if we can just skirt around the problem? It is great that someone came out and said, “we are going to find a creative solution to this dilemma”.
Is the world perfect yet? Not at all. From what I have seen (DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer) Fedora still can not ship the mp3 codec because of redistribution issues but it does allow us to point users to a place where they can legally download it. Perhaps the Fedora community will come up with creative solutions for making it even easier to get. I’m excited at the possibilities. Kudos to you Fluendo and thanks for the legwork it took getting this gift to the community.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
December 24th, 2005 at 4:55 pm
OTOH, the more people that use the systems but don’t pay the royalties, the less companies like Fraunhofer will consider their current (ridiculous IP farming) business model to be viable.
December 24th, 2005 at 6:25 pm
That is so not true. How many people do you know care enough to boycott mp3? No one cares, they just want to listen to their music. You wouldn’t even make a dent and the propriatary formats would just steam roller over all of us. By embracing the codecs in legal ways, gaining respect from both the Open Source camp and the business camp, Fluendo can start selling their Flumotion server, and hey it supports ogg out of the box. Perhaps then we will see more media outlets supporting the format.
We need to crawl before we walk and walk before we run. Trying to skip to the running stage and you will find we are going no where fast. I want to support Fluendo because I know they are the ones who are going to take a careful look at the industry and figure out the best ways to move us to open formats. Offering up a legal mp3 codec is just the start.
December 25th, 2005 at 4:53 am
I think I have a solution: include as default mp3 gstreamer plugin in Fedora a stub. This will display a window with something like:
“Due to patent restriction, Fedora can’t include code for mp3 playback, we recommend to use Ogg Vorbis instead.
However, if you *really* need mp3 playback, click here to download and install a free binary from Fluendo.”
I think this is the best compromise: still promote Ogg Vorbis, Fedora remain not patent encumbered and users have a way to hear their mp3 files (and the possibility to convert them to another format - as the Fluendo plugin is only a *decoder*)
December 26th, 2005 at 9:37 am
As long as it is only a decoder and it only works with gstreamer, I don’t think it will have a lot of impact for a long time.
It requires someone to code a decent player program which uses gstreamer. That hasn’t even been possible yet, but the latest release show some progress being made. Maybe in some day it will escape its roots of being a streaming framework and start being a media framework.
As long as it only decodes you’ll mostly always need to install something which encodes anyway. I must admit, that I wouldn’t even bother installing it on any of the machines I help people with (non technical friends). When I see a program which proves that gstreamer is improved to be useful and maybe a “killer app” comes along that might change. Free WMV, Mov and RM player plugins might be the basis for such an app.
It’s a nice gesture by flumotion, but useful in business settings primarily I think. Home users just don’t care. You’d need a lawyer to nag you everytime you played an mp3.
The long term solution is ogg (and free codecs in genereal) support for hardware and software becoming prevalent.
December 28th, 2005 at 10:03 pm
Why doesnt everyone just use the codecs f- them quit being cowards if they sue you they sue you.. they would run out of resources if everyone blatantly used it and said “just sue me” i dont care what you say but the money will STILL end up in the pockets of m$ and the like in the end and i REFUSE to support them in any way.
January 8th, 2006 at 11:51 am
all mp3
March 17th, 2006 at 12:04 pm
please submit sources for mp3 codec
regards,
marty
January 28th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
wew
January 28th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Why doesnt everyone just use the codecs