RMS, Free software and the Ubuntu CDs

[Mario Vukelic]

On Sat, 2006-07-01 at 13:17 +0100, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> w32codecs is a free software package

While I agree with everything else, this was wrong. w32codecs contains
Windows (win32) DLLs. They are certainly not free, but proprietary to
MS, Apple, and others:

aptitude show w32codecs
Description: win32 binary codecs
This package contain video codecs for popular proprietary formats not
natively supported by mplayer.
 ATI VCR-2 video codec.
 Cinepak video codec
 DivX ;-) video codec, ver. 3.11
 DivX ;-) video codec, ver. 4.x
 Indeo Video 3.2/4.1/5.0/4.1 quick/5.0 quick codecs.
 Intel 263 video codec.
 Microsoft MPEG-4 video codec, beta version 3.0.0.2700
 Morgan Multimedia Motion JPEG video codec.
 QuickTime
 RealAudio
 RealVideo 8
 RealVideo 9
 Windows Media Video 9

They are probably legal in some countries *if* you own a Windows
license. If you don't they can only be legal in countries that don't
recognize software copyrights (and probably patents, dunno about
trademarks or trade secrets) at all, which are few nowadays.