I my employers business, is not fighting IP or making a statement against MS. They just want to offer their employees a tool that is at least equal to what he had in the past- without dealing with compliance issues.

I mean for goodness sakes Canonical didn’t think twice about removing the Gimp or signing up to Bahoo for search. Canonical also has no qualms about using Nvidia binary-blobs.

This is only an issue because Canonical have allowed it to become an issue. They’ve for some inexplicable and perplexing reason been totally unwilling to make a decision on this. The closest they’ve come is allowing Fluendo codecs to be sold in the Canonical web store.

Canonical knows what it has to do.

The difference is third party software is typically easier to install in Windows. That is why I have created a script called BleedingEdge http://sourceforge.net/projects/bleedingedge/ for Ubuntu. It does the command line work of adding repositories and installing proprietary software for the average noob. My goal is to make installing third party software as easy as ‘point and click’ for my family, friends, and students and thereby remove a barrier to Linux use.

(1) Stick together and refuse to produce or consume media in patent-encumbered formats.

(2) Write thoughtful, positive letters to your representatives asking that they pass legislation requiring government media to conform to open, patent-free standards.

(3) Write thoughtful, positive letters to major media companies asking them to support open Ogg formats with HTML5.

Never show sarcasm or arrogance; just clearly and factually state your position. It’s our culture; don’t give it up to Corporate control without a fight.

I would imagine most everyone knows the situation with web design and designers having to accomodate IE 5.5 at worst, 6 at best. Right now it creates havoc for blog sites that use WYSIWYG formats (which tend to be IE based): any browser that meets or comes close to W3C standards tends to have problems with formatting input.

I mentioned browsers because multimedia seems to me to be tied fairly close to browser technology, and the dilemma continues. Ogg Vorbis has worked beautifully for me (including when I still ran Windows) but I keep having to convert to .mp3 if I want users to be able to follow my podcasts and such. And tech media (such as OSNews) is buzzing about whether h264 or Theora will come out ahead right now; as Apple’s devices (certainly the iPod and iPhone but even the iPad if I may dare say so) are leading the microcomputing market right now and h264 is Apple’s codec. It’s pretty messy stuff IMHO even with current MPEG-LA reports (end users don’t have to pay a license fee *if* they use a licensed encoder for free content).

And that’s just speaking of formats that work well. I know of the legal entanglement with Adobe; but I understand many Debian-based distro users install their Flash codec because some sites using Flash won’t work with .swf. Solutions for .pdf files was a little easier for me but I had to go with xpdf instead of Document Viewer because the latter wouldn’t display some files correctly.

I know some GNU/Linux users are very passionate about staying away from the inherent traps in patent restrictions but I imagine many in our branch of the distro world are much indeed like you, Mr. Tozzi. And when I moved to Mint I was glad that the process of installing proprietary codecs was even more streamlined to the existing GUI (no messing with the CLI needed).

I’m very much looking forward to the upcoming articles.

When a company or government agency is deploying Ubuntu for their employees, full multimedia functionality is a essential part of the requirements. Legal codecs is the only way to go.