I was reading this article on works with ubuntu and I had to take issue with one very small point:
Beyond rarely used instances of Windows and hardware drivers, I was able to think of only three additional closed-source components of my systems. These are Adobe’s flash plugin, media decoders for formats like mp3 and Microsoft’s fonts.
My problem is how he is lumping MP3 encoding and decoding into the closed-source pile and this is something that frustrates me terribly. Ubuntu users should be much better educated about what the issues with codecs really are. It’s not because they’re all windows dlls (w32codecs) and thus are copyright infringement on someone else’s creative work or violate the DMCA because they break some trade organisation’s encryption scheme.
The mp3 format is supported in Ubuntu by liblame and libmad, liblame is a Free and Open Source library for encoding mp3 audio data, libmad for decoding, licensed under the LGPL and GLPv2 respectively. The reason why they’re not included by default is because some mobsters in Germany and France (Accatel) have dubiously applicable patents, which may or may not apply them. No one will ever check to see if they actually apply, or if there is a way around them because they’re all too scared. Let’s just pretend they don’t exist and perhaps we’ll avoid triple damages in US courts.
Although I notice no ones removed vfat, ntfs or other kernel drivers because of known patents. Although saying that, not that TomTom got sued for these, perhaps they won’t last long.
There is some of the codec stuff that is closed-source, the whole w32codecs should be scraped and we should support ffmpeg’s support of wmv and other formats (which I believe is happening). Closed source is bad technically and it’s bad socially, think about the support costs of having to fix the nvidia driver integration all the time and what better tasks these guys could be putting it to.
Now the crazy situation with libdvdcss requires the DMCA and the EUCD to be killed. No where in my moral book does it allow a government to send a citizen to jail for 10 years for playing his store bought DVD in his store bought computer, just because he’s not paid the DVD Forum cartel. And so, no questions, these laws must go.
So if you want support for codecs in Ubuntu hope for these things:
- Support FOSS implementations (ffmpeg, gnash etc)
- Remove the DMCA, EUCD and similar laws.
- Remove or limit the scope of software patents
- Education that allows us to choose when it’s safe to include the FOSS libs.