Not impressed at all with crippled apps!

English Applications
1

I just learnt from another Linux forum that the reason ktorrent always had the DHT option “grey doubt” (greyed out) is because it is purposely crippled by suse because for “legal reasons”.

This raises the question - “how many other applications are purposely crippled in openSUSE”?

I would like a list of all the crippled applications so that I can un-nazify my copy of openSUSE 11.1, where can I find such a thing?

2

Thats the reason the Packman repo exists.

Crippled or limited apps that I know of include:

kaffeine
xine and xine1 libraries etc
ffmpeg
ktorrent

Edit: Almost forgot amarok

3

You may not be impressed at all with crippled apps but Novell will be very impressed when they get into legal trouble for providing uncrippled ones. Besides, you should disable DHT yourself since there are a lot of lurkers on it and even when it’s enabled you’ll get only a few extra peers

4

DHT is better OFF anyway, I agree with @microchip8
It’s just a lurking place for trouble and it swamps your router.

5

Fair enough about DHT.

But what irked me is the fact that we (the end users) are treated with both contempt and disrespect by the “providers” because we are never informed about these things (crippled apps).

I have been wondering for ages why DHT was always grey doubt, (grey doubt=slack programming practices that give no explanation as to why a “feature” is disabled/not available), it would have been nice to have been informed.

6

There’s codec patent issues with some multimedia players, but the ktorrent-dht is just that the developers don’t bother with dht support for every incremental upgrade. There’s a package you can install from the packman repos that creates a dependency to prevent upgrading ktorrent to non-dht versions of ktorrent. For example, I have ktorrent2 from packman and also ktorrent2-feature-dht from the same repo.

7

Issue or not issue.
Every application that has been modified in order to comply with the needs of Novel to avoid patent issues, should state this clearly and understandably:
***i.e. in the “about”: "This application in order to comply with current U.S. patent legislation has been modified and may lack certain features. ***
And it should be done only when the application REALY has been modified, not just everywhere. It seems to me that with Kaffeine they have done it.

THIS would be OPENsuse. Instead we seem to have a tendency for opensuse.

This would not cost anything and would be IMHO transparent, leaving the choice to the end-users.

Just my two cent.

(Btw.: I keep wondering how much innovation the US is loosing with the patent wars and how much this exaggerated transfer cost will delay the restart of the local national(and also partly regional) economies).