ubuntu aims (Re: Idea for expanded support of some non-free software

[Daniel Stone]

On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 09:27 +0100, Philippe Landau wrote:
> Jeff Waugh wrote:
> >>open source is there to change this.  in the transition period, 
> >>there is no way around supporting mainstream proprietary formats. 
> >>is it possible to have at least one canonical team member 
> >>work on this full time ?
> > No, that's not what we're here to do, but we will happily 
> > accept packages into our universe and multiverse repositories 
> > as long as they are legally redistributable.
> you just wrote:
> 
> >> of these, multimedia is the one lacking most, 
> >> so it would justify the biggest attention.
> > Sure, and we're working on it, [...]
> if, as you wrote, there are around 20 canonical
> employees working on ubuntu, why can not at least
> one concentrate on the field admittedly lacking the most ?

Because, as Matt said -- we're hackers, not lawyers.  The technical
problems to do with multimedia have already been solved, as you can see
by the fact that you can play these files if you use illegal software.
The problems left to be solved are all legal; we cannot redistribute the
solution.  So, if we are to have support for proprietary multimedia
formats included, we need to investigate how to redistribute them.
No-one from any distribution has yet come up with any real good ideas.

And there are certainly not 20 of us full-time on Ubuntu; the number
would be closer to 10.

> >>>However, we can increase demand for unencumbered formats 
> >>>such as the Xiph stable - Ogg with Vorbis, Speex, Theora, etc. 
> >>great, how could canonical contribute to this ?
> > We're shipping all of these by default, supporting them as default formats,
> > and feeding patches and bugs back upstream where appropriate. 
> while demand is limited, this is not enough to change anything.

How do you suggest we increase demand (says the man with 16GB of Vorbis
ripped from CD)?

> > How could you contribute to this? :-)
> like all users i could convert media to these open formats
> if ubuntu offered an easy way to do it.

How?  If we cannot read, say, MP3 for the purpose of playing it, then we
cannot read MP3 for the purpose of decoding to PCM and then encoding to
Vorbis.  This is, again, a legal problem.  The technical issues to do
with transcoding (which is horrific and gives awful quality) have all
been solved, but the legal ones -- how do I ship an MP3 decoder without
being smacked down by Fraunhofer/Thomson? -- have not.

> >>>We can provide opportunities for people to provide legal and licensed
> >>>software for using encumbered formats like DVD, everything mpeg, mp3,
> >>>etc.
> >>excellent. is this possible ?
> > Of course.
> this is confusing me: first you write for months that
> you are still looking for legal ways to do this,
> and now you say it is possible just like that ?

Anything is possible.  I'm sure if billions of dollars was thrown at the
DVD consortium, we'd get carte blanche to distribute DVD players.  I
don't think Matt was saying it was possible with a click of his fingers,
else I strongly suspect it would be done by now.