RMS, Free software and the Ubuntu CDs

[jean gruneberg]

Daniel Carrera wrote:

> If you live in the USA please write to your congressman about repealing
> the DMCA. This is not Canonical's fault. It's incredibly unreasonable to
> blame Canonical for not wanting to break a law that might carry jail
> sentences.

Daniel

Please this was never a dip at Canonical or RMS for that matter.  I was 
trying to question if the black / white nature of open source argument 
would serve the community in its attempts to get market share in the 
long run (Michael - thanks for coming to my rescue).

Question... obviously Canonical (as an example only!) can not license 
mp3 payback because they do not charge for the distro.  Neither have dvd 
playback out the box (so to speak) due to licensing / legal issues.

Now someone goes to the RIAA / DVD patent owners / Movie studio's 
whoever, and says - here is a piece of software that plays dvd's on 
Linux, I want to have a license to distribute it with Linux for free as 
it will increase your market share in the desktop world.  The RIAA / 
patent holders say sure - do it legally with our blessing (lets not get 
into the whole dcma issue here - this is imaginary).

He then comes to Canonical with a piece of free but closed source legal 
software that would be very important to the average user that we are 
trying to convert to linux on the desktop.

Do we get it included or not?

And the same for mp3 etc etc etc

Personally I believe that RMS's very black / white view of what Linux 
should be is going to harm us in the long run at getting greater desktop 
adoption.

Jean