do you want water with that?
I was glancing over the Planet Gentoo RSS feed, (using Ticho's RSSyl plugin for Sylpheed-Claws), and noticed a link in a post to an entry entitled "MP3 for free" in J5's blog. It turns out that this mp3 for free is a product by a company called Fluendo, the product being an mp3 decoding plug-in for the GStreamer framework. The J5's blog entry puts forward some, in my opinion, dubious views and arguments, and points to a further entry on another blog with another misnomer, Perfect Present, which has more weak arguments.
To cut to the chase, this thing pretty much sums up the diluting of Free Software that I alluded to in a previous post. The elementary error is in confusing the meaning of Free in Free Software. This free that is talked of is as in free beer and not as in freedom, the point stressed is that the enduser can download it for free. The plugin is released under the MIT licence, but, due to the mp3 patents, and the licensing agreement Fluendo has with Thomson and Frauhenofer, "the no-cost license from Fluendo only covers desktop use, all other uses of the binaries need a separate license". According to Perfect Present, developers can download the source code and work on improving it in their free time then submit their patches to Fluendo who will then improve their product and, one would presume, gain more market value. …hmm, I'm beginning to understand their definition of free.
This gift to the community is more like a poison apple. Maybe if we bend over backwards far enough we'll be able to fit our head in our ass.
Tue, 3rd Jan 2006 9:39:58 +01:00
I couldn't word it in any better way you did. That's exactly what I thought upon discovering this crap. This announce from Fluendo started a huge thread on the ubuntu-devel mailing list, too, where the discussion had a (rather sad) USA-oriented point of view. "What do you mean patents are invalid shit in Europe?".
The problem with distributions is that they have to take this patent crap into account if they want "market share" in the US. Hence they all ship with crippled versions of mplayer, only capable of playing *.wav and raw YUV video… Apart for Gentoo-like distributions that are not actually distributing the "controversial" stuff.
Using