Idea for expanded support of some non-free software

[thully at umich.edu]

While Ogg Vorbis is a fine format that is in fact superior to mp3,
most portable players (including the iPod) do not support it.  Are we
going to tell people to trash their iPods and buy some player they've
never heard of? This seems like an unacceptable solution to me.  Also,
as far as flash/java goes - free players just don't work well at this time.
There needs to be support for Macromedia's player and Sun Java - while they
don't need to be on the CD, bugs involving these need to be taken care of.

For example - Although Macromedia's player can be downloaded from multiverse of
automatically in Firefox, currently there are bugs in Hoary that cause Flash
sound not to work when Gnome sound server is on.  I've reported this and there
does not seem to be much interest in fixing the bug - as it involves non-free
software.  This does not make me very happy, as usability seems to be
unnecessarily taking a back seat to issues of licensing in this case.  While it
would be preferable to use all free software and use Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, etc
all the time, this is not practical because you can't view web sites with
content in non-free formats with free software (at least not consistently well)
and other devices (such as iPod or MP3-CD player) may not support Ogg Vorbis and
other free formats (and no,
trashing the device is not an option in most cases). In my opinion, issues like
these are what is inhibiting the adoption of Linux on the desktop.

Because of all this, Ubuntu should offer support for non-free formats when
legally possible and when it greatly improves the user experience.  This seems
like a similar situation to the one that led Ubuntu to include non-free drivers
for hardware.