Ubuntu's not GNU/Linux?

Matthias-Christian Ott ott at mirix.org
Sat Apr 17 13:18:38 UTC 2010


On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 01:21:10PM +0000, Diogo Santos wrote:
> Launchpad was never proprietary, by the simple reason that Canonical was
> the only user, and had all the 4 freedoms of the Free Software definition.
> Therefore it's false that launchpad was proprietary. The same applies to
> Ubuntu One infrastructure. Private Software is also Free Software
> (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html).

No, I use the software over the internet and the four Freedoms were not
given to me as a user until recently, therefore was not Free Software,
because Free Software garants its users the four freedoms.

> Patented formats are a problem in USA and a few other countries. Not so
> much to rest of the world, we should avoid it by precaution to the Future,
> but not to exagerate. I don't really care about USPTO stupidity. Excluding
> MP3 from the store would render it useless for digital portable music
> players (or most of them).

In Germany there have been legal consequences for some companies for
violating MP3 patents. There are several parties (mainly in the USA
and EU) who claim to hold MP3 patents. So a considerable amount of the
world's computer users can't legally use Free Software to decode MP3
files. Though the patent situation of MP3 is a bit weird, it's not a
"stupidity" of the USPTO.

For most private users violating the MP3 patents may be tolerable,
because the patent holders would hardly make profit by suing them. But
for companies and public institutions it's a problem to use free MP3
decoders, because even if you wanted to obtain invididual licences
for your copies of the software, it's still hard to make negotiations
with the patent holders.

If you consciously choose to buy software from a vendor who sells only
music that you could get somewhere else as an MP3 in the FLAC or Ogg
Vorbis format, you probably have a compatible player. Otherwise you can
still (possibly illegally) encode it into MP3.

There are some players which play FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. A device with
high ratings is e.g. the SanDisk Sansa Clip+.

> Canonical as also stated that it's working to remove some proprietary file
> formats like wma from the store, and recomends not buying music in that
> format, and promised to work to include Vorbis and FLAC as soon as it's
> possible. This is far from optimal, but to me is good enough to be used if
> they keep their promisses (and I have no reason to doubt from that).

Some major music labels won't do that. It took years and some efforts of
really well selling music store to even convince them to use MP3.

> I don't care that Canonical includes proprietary software in it's store. As
> long as I can tell what it is, and as long as it's not imposed to users,
> it's not installed by default in Ubuntu and keeps offering and promoting
> quality free alternatives as they've been doing.

I was not talking about the freedom of Ubuntu, but rather about the
attitude of Canonical which dictates the future and development
direction of Ubuntu.

I simply don't feel comfortable with their attitude.

Regards,
Matthias-Christian



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