canonical to sell proprietary codecs!

[Ric Moore]

On Sat, 2008-09-20 at 15:27 +0300, Willy K. Hamra wrote:
> i just read in slashdot
> (http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/19/166230) that
> canonical is planning to sell proprietary codecs for ubuntu users since
> these are important for the user experience etc..
> what about w32codecs though? it's in medibuntu and not the universe
> repos, but aren't these enough? i can play all the DVDs i ever got in
> kubuntu using w32codecs allright. as for songs, i usually prefer to
> convert everyting to ogg using oggconvert, but i already have mp3 and rm
> support. so what codecs are they planning to sell? does this affect
> w32codecs in anyway?

There is a package of codecs that has been for sale for some time. I
ferget the name. Hopefully someone will jump in with it. I guess
Canonical could sell them as easily as anyone else, with it's large
customer base. Meanwhile, I doubt it will affect anyone using the
mplayer, xine and ffmpeg codex's without much to worry over. Heck, way
back when a $10 investment in oss was the only route to enable most
motherboard based sound cards. With a lifetime of updates, it wasn't a
bad deal. It was 10 bucks or beat your brains out for weeks, to no
effect, so you did have a choice. 

Plus Hannu released his source later on, so things worked out in the end
by keeping the "Open" in "Open-Source". BTW, OSS is not "depreciated".
It is still alive and well. Only Hannu can depreciate it, as it's his
intellectual child. I think the website is http://www.opensound.com
Ric
 
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