fedora core 5, and the effects of patent compliance
So I’m trying out fedora core 5 (thanks in no small part to the power of partitionmagic).
Biggest thing I’ve noticed so far: nothing remotely related to home-user type multimedia works, at all. No xvid, no divx, no mpeg, no dvd, no mp3.
Why’s that? Well, patents, of course! ’cause you see, Fedora, like the parent company redhat, and like most commercial linux entities (and several non-commercial ones as well), lack the balls to distribute potentially infringing software in their distributions.
MPEG (including mp3) is covered by Fraunhofer’s patents, and so nobody can legally use it. That’s pretty much the long and short of it anyway.
It’s pretty impressive how utterly useless the system is, without the normal things that a desktop user would want. Like, you know, everything.
FC5 looks like it’d be nice, if it weren’t for the chilling effect of not including any proprietary or potentially patent-infringing software. But without a distribution-friendly way to handle nvidia drivers, sun’s jdk, flash, xvid and mp3 playback, I don’t think this thing’s going to work out :p.
June 14th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
Slightly out of date I know, but may be worth your while looking at the rpmforge repo for FC/RHEL.
It won’t handle nVidia, or Java, as for mp3/flash/xvid components, it has most of them (mplayer/vlc/xmms-*).
Of course there are plenty of 3rd party repos, however rpmforge is one of the safer ones (i.e. good packages, and rpmforge’s policy is not to replace core packages) – which is why I would class it under ‘distribution-friendly’.
June 14th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
Good to know about …
I’ve somewhat abandoned the FC side-project for the time being, pretty much for that reason and the lack of time to mess with it… but if I end up going back to it at some point (which is likely) I’ll keep that in mind.
June 14th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
Depends what your looking for really – may not also hurt to take a look at CentOS (RHEL rebuild).
Don’t get newest packages in it, or anything close, but stability does make a nice change after a couple years on FC.