On Monday 17 Aug 2009, steve wrote:
[snip] Since Fedora sticks to free software and freedom principle, you might find some 'basic' features missing -- such as support for mp3 and other patent encumbered media formats
Nothing to do with Fedora per se, but aren't patent-ridden softwares like MP3 decoders only a problem in countries that have software patents? Perhaps it's time to start telling the distributors to have a "US-only" distribution that excludes patent-ridden software, and provide all software by default to the "Rest of the World". A question like, "Do you live in a backward country that has software patents?" at the start of the install would go a long way in establishing what people are missing ;)
BTW, I was pleasantly surprised the other day to find MP3 players, etc. in the main Debian repositories, from where they had been missing earlier:
# apt-cache policy mpg123 mpg123: Version table: 1.7.2-3 0 990 http://ftp.XX.debian.org testing/main Packages # apt-cache policy mplayer mplayer: Version table: 1.0~rc3+svn20090405-1 0 990 http://ftp.XX.debian.org testing/main Packages
Surprised because earlier Debian also had a no-MP3 policy and you had to go to debian-multimedia.org to get MP3-related packages. It changed sometime in the past 6 months or so, perhaps some Debian contributor can tell us when and why.
Regards,
-- Raju