Ubuntu's not GNU/Linux?

[Matthias-Christian Ott]

On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 11:46:08PM +0200, =?UTF-8?Q?Stian R=C3=B8dven Eide?= wrote:
> There has always been somewhat of a discrepancy between the commitments
> laid out by Ubuntu's manifestos and the actions of Canonical. One of the most
> prominent ways in which Ubuntu has distinguished itself from other distributions
> is how they've been helping people install patented codecs and proprietary
> software themselves. The most prominent of the alternatives have been:
> * "Those repositories are not part of the project" (Debian, Fedora)

For Debian I'm not sure how serious they take it, because they host
the non-free repository on their servers.

Fedora is really ambitious about this and made a clear decision.
Repositories from community or company which contain proprietary
software have their own servers and are in no way related to the
distribution itself.

> * "Buy our PowerPack/EnterpriseDesktop" (Mandriva, RedHat, SuSe)

If you really need legal certainty and have to work with patended
standards (MPEG-2 or MPEG-4), this is a good option for you.

Rather than accusing these companies, you should be thankful to them
they make it possible that you can legally work with Free Software on
mulimedia content. Most cameras, recorders and "content providers"
don't support free formats and open standards, so accusing the
providers and manufacturers is a better choice.

> * "We're a non-profit community project. No one will sue us" (Arch, Mint, etc.)

This approach might work when you are an individual, but a public
institution or company can't accept breaking software patents.

> For instance, in at least one case we could argue that it has been made 
> un-needed. What I find most absurd is perhaps that Adobe Reader is included 
> in Canonical's repository, when the free readers work at least as well.

There is actually no need for including the Adobe Reader in their
repository even if people wanted it. Adobe has a yum repository for
Fedora, because the Fedora Project refused to include it in their
repositories. I can imagine that this would happen if Canonical removes
the Adobe Reader from Ubuntu since they already have an APT repository
for the flash player which Canonical also distributes.

Despite this, I've never found a PDF document that didn't work with
xpdf or evince.

Regards,
Matthias-Christian