Idea for expanded support of some non-free software

[Jerry Haltom]

How much longer is this going to go one?

On Wed, 2004-12-08 at 18:47 -0500, thully at umich.edu wrote:
> 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.
> 
-- 
Jerry Haltom <wasabi at larvalstage.net>