Fedora - DELL ?

[Les Mikesell]

Andy Green wrote:

> This problem: ''It's Linux that brings a problem into this picture.'' 
> Mentioned after your noting that Dells ship with MP3 and WMA and "It's 
> Linux that brings a problem into this picture.".  The reason Linux 
> distros don't ship with that support is patents.  I hope that clears up 
> your sudden attack of 'confusion'.

No, it doesn't clear it up, given that other operating systems are able 
to arrange distribution with patented components.  I'm not insisting 
that this combination be free, just available.

>> you are willing to meet the licensing terms of all the components you 
>> want to have, no one is allowed to combine them for you if any part is 
>> covered by the GPL and any other part has different restrictions.
> 
> These are completely separate areas in law.  The GPL operates under 
> Copyright law.  But the work you have fully legitimate copyright to can 
> easily violate dozens of patents, which is regulated by a completely 
> separate body of patent law.  Let's imagine your enduser view of the GPL 
> making problems was solved.  Say the GPL became BSD overnight.  Still 
> Redhat cannot bundle mp3 players due to patent law.

They would no longer be constrained by licensing to not add components 
with different redistribution restrictions.  So they could bundle 
anything they want as long as the license requirements were met 
independently.

> I have to say I noted the irony of your using Alan Cox's code in the 
> networking stack to piss him off.  Seems your complaints should be 
> tempered by some recognition that a lot of work went into giving us this 
> stuff for free.  Without acknowledging the debt, your complaints sound 
> like a teenager complaining about how unfair his life is, while he lives 
> under a roof he doesn't have to pay for, eats food, wears clothes that 
> are given to him.

Is there something unique about the linux kernel that should matter to 
me?  It is a convenient place to run X, apache, sendmail, perl, nfs, 
java, firefox, openoffice, etc. and I use it because it has hijacked 
much driver and kernel development that might have gone into the *bsd's 
otherwise.  But I'll turn your comment around and point out that Linux 
wouldn't exist without the design and specification of the original 
proprietary version of unix, and those other applications wouldn't exist 
without their original proprietary host OS's and in many cases their own 
proprietary versions.  If you are going to pay homage to the development 
cycle, you should point out the irony of the self-serving GPL exception
allowing linkage with proprietary libraries of operating systems that it 
happens to need to run and initially couldn't have existed without, yet 
denying distribution with other binary-only components.  What's that 
about acknowledging debt?  Meanwhile I still buy copies of Windows and 
OS X for my machines because Linux distributions don't (and perhaps 
can't ever) include components to do all of the equivalent things.

>> How is this going to change?  I expect encodings to continue to 
>> improve and for people to continue to need a way to fund the 
>> development work. The GPL just doesn't provide a good model to fairly 
>> share those costs and it doesn't co-exist well with the schemes that do.
> 
> Yeah that's actually right IMO.  About a year ago I had the same 
> argument with ESR.  Proprietary software -- proprietary in the copyright 
> sense -- is given meaning and a lease of life by proprietary codecs -- 
> proprietary in the patent sense.  The two are symbiotic because they can 
> share revenue.  The FOSS "niche" is everywhere else.
> 
> Because of great patent-free codecs like Matroska and Vorbis we are not 
> locked out of participating in audio and video, but the content 
> rightsholders, by their choice of patent-protected codings, can and will 
> lock us out of being able to offer their content. 

Yes, content is what matters, so those codecs become important when/if 
the content you want is available in that encoding.  Until the content 
vendors give up on DRM by finding out it doesn't sell, that's probably 
not going to happen.

> And despite ESR's 
> naive hopes of getting rescued by Linspire, there is nothing that can be 
> done about it from this side going on.  And who to blame?  Patent law.

I agree that we'd be better off if software were recognized as math and 
not eligible for patents, but the mere existence of a patent doesn't 
mean that the terms of licensing have to be unreasonable or that the 
license can't be arranged and aggregated by a distributor.  However 
vendor-provided binary drivers are a more immediate issue relating 
specifically to Linux. The mp3 discussion was just a sidetrack since 
it's all application level and can be done without inheriting any GPL 
restrictions.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com