Thanks to the Packman repository, I’m easily able to install the decoders for restricted video and audio formats (mp3, mp4, avi and mpeg). However, it’s still a bad feeling that although open-source codecs exist for those formats (thanks to fluendo), they can’t be distributed with openSUSE due to the “plague” known as software patents. In my opinion, lacking default support for those formats is one of the few things that still makes openSUSE a less complete OS out of the box. I’m curious what chances exist to fix this problem sometime in the near future.
First of all, are there any negotiations going between those who own the patents and the developers / companies of Linux distributions to get to an understanding? There should be some legal way of solving this problem with them. Since all Linux distributions are affected, an option would be for the teams (Attachmate, Novell, etc) to pay those who own the mpeg formats to remove those restrictions, with the help of community donations that could be raised for this purpose (I’d definitely chip in at least 10$ for this). I mean there are people who buy entire companies… surely with such a large scale effort the freedom of a codec could be bought.
If there’s no way to negotiate with whoever owns the formats, aren’t there other legal options to make Linux distros support those formats? Perhaps an alternate architecture that can read such files might be created, bypassing whatever clause the patent includes. Also, an important question is if the source code for such decoders are also a problem. If patents only affect the binaries, openSUSE could include the sources and users would simply make-install to get them working. I doubt it’s going as far as some lines of code being outlawed… at least I hope it’s not.
Overall, what are the solutions for this? Any hope of a change happening soon, and any news about such a thing? So far, Ubuntu’s been able to include them out of the box, and if it was an outright illegal act the #1 Linux distribution would surely not be doing it. Looking at it realistically, it’s year 2012. IMHO it’s medieval for an advanced operating system to lack support for the most common video and audio formats because of bad laws. Surely Linux is big enough to be acknowledged (in many aspects it’s beyond Windows) and only a matter of time until someone realizes this is silly and comes up with a solution.
It is a pain for the user who wants certain proprietary or patented drivers but it goes with the territory of Free and Open Source Software… There are good alternative to, for example, nvidia drivers (Nouveau) and mp3 (Ogg vorbis - supported by more “mp3” players these days). But at the end of the day, if you want these restricted drivers then you need to install them yourself; remember mp3 usage on Linux is not allowed in certain countries without paying a fee. Maybe the best solution would be to lobby policy makers (your MP or equivalent) into opening up these tied in codecs allowing truly free access for everyone. Hope this helps you understand the complexities of our daft patent laws
Penguinclaw: I read that page last night. I was mostly aware of what the issue is about, but my curiosity is what can be done about it… hopefully more than just “nothing” on the long run. To post my ideas in a better order (was too tired last night to go in more detail) those are the things I was thinking of:
The companies and developers behind all Linux distributions, together with the users of Linux, raising enough money to buy the freedom of that codec and pay for the patent to be gone. If Novell, Attachmate, and those behind other distros have enough money for a good Linux cause, plus enough users willing to donate and add to that, we can likely raise any sum the owner of the mpeg format could want for permanently freeing mp3 / mpg. Why not make such an initiative?
If that isn’t possible, perhaps the owner of each distribution can instead pay the patent holders to make an exception for their distro. This would probably require paying them monthly, but IMO it’s a worthy effort for having a good and complete OS. There are donation-based projects that make such efforts, and openSUSE is also a distribution that’s supported by a large company.
If neither of the two ideas above work, the Linux teams and community could raise money for lawyers that can take this court, and work on proving that such patents affect free software in a way that’s unacceptable. Which in my opinion is perfectly true… as in any normal world, you don’t see code made by community on the open internet outlawed by software patents, except maybe some rare and barely visible cases. Sadly the US is always a few years behind the normal world.
If nothing legal can be done (none of the 3 ideas above), can’t we find a way to include the decoders without breaking the law? As in seeing exactly what the patent says… maybe it can be included with a special encryption, under a special clause, can use an algorithm that isn’t covered by the patent, etc. Or maybe just the source code can be included if the patent only addresses binaries, and users can then make-install. Not to bump the topic… but I occasionally hear of criminals who find loopholes to avoid the law, and we aren’t even harming anyone or doing something morally wrong
If nothing at all can be done to include those codecs on the DVD (none of the 4 above points), can’t openSUSE at least have it’s own software repository for those codecs (on download.opensuse.org)? It’s not difficult to set up the Packman repo, but Packman isn’t ran by openSUSE and one can never know what might happen to it. From what I understand Ubuntu has a package like that, and that’s actually included by default in its case. If it’s an issue of even hosting those packages on a US server, there are a lot of EU mirrors for download.opensuse.org. The link to the repository can be included in openSUSE but disabled by default with a disclaimer.
Normally that was it. But after reading the restricted formats page again, I noticed something else that caught my eye:
The mp3 licensing FAQ and royalty pages state that that “no license is needed for private, non-commercial activities (e.g., home-entertainment, receiving broadcasts and creating a personal music library), not generating revenue or other consideration of any kind or for entities with associated annual gross revenue less than US$ 100.000”.
Although there are companies that use openSUSE on their work computers, many users (such as myself) download it for “private and non-commercial activities”. Selling openSUSE on DVD in shops is a commercial activity, so that version is out of discussion. But downloading the openSUSE image for free from download.opensuse.org is not, as no one generates any revenue from that. If someone then uses it for commercial activity, it’s entirely their business, not that of openSUSE. Therefore, if I understand this correctly, the version distributed on the opensuse website can include them, as long as those who download don’t generate revenue with the codecs. For those who do, the installer could contain an optional checkbox and inform users to not enable it if it’s for a work machine.
This is a very strange argument, and as a supporter of free software (even though a pragmatist), I would not want “my” distro to do that. If you want to pay for codecs, you are free to do so if you need them (I think there are such packages available for Suse). Why should a distro do so?
If you consider a distro without mp3 support not a “good and complete OS”, you have the right to pay for it and support something which in my opinion is conceptually wrong, but you should not have the right to make me pay for it.
I think something like that would send a completely wrong message.
Not what I meant (or at least imagined). First of all, I don’t believe “it’s not good enough without mp3 support out of the box”. Just that it would be better and closer to being complete (for everyday usage) if it had such. I love SUSE as it is.
Also, I wasn’t suggesting that people should pay for it if they don’t want. I meant a donation based system, in which monthly donations as well as the companies behind openSUSE (if they’d want) would pay for a patent exception. There is the non-oss repository for everything that isn’t fully free but still included, I think the codecs would go there too. Don’t think this would affect the OS itself in any negative way, but I’m not one to know best. It would suck to give money to someone monthly to be allowed to include a package, but it’s still not a direct system dependency and openSUSE would remain just as free otherwise.
Also keep in mind that the codecs would be included together with their source like every other application and library. There aren’t any problems with licensing the codecs themselves, just the patents which can address anyone’s code. The code for fluendo’s mp3 is MIT licensed and IIRC GPL-compatible, and if the patents were gone it could be included as such.
On 09/25/2012 02:06 PM, MirceaKitsune wrote:
> the owner of each distribution
perhaps before you spend a great deal of time on ways to make openSUSE
better (like by including proprietary software) you need to better
understand the concept of free and open software [FOSS]…
there is no “owner” of this distribution like there is an owner of
Adobe, Apple, or PlayStation…
that is, if you use openSUSE you are part of the ‘community’ of
developers, supporters, users, producers etc etc etc…
and you are as much the ‘owner’ of this distribution as anyone else!
AMD, Novell, Attachmate, Heinlein, IP Exchange, B1 Systems and many
other companies and individuals are sponsors and contributors…not owners.
and, the open in openSUSE is this community’s commitment to NOT
distribute proprietary software–even if all those non-owning sponsors
chipped in about paid off all the patent holders!
if you wanna buy the codecs, you are welcome to and you would not be the
only person her to have done so…
if you want to add proprietary software to your system you sure may
(there is loads of it for sale–lots and lots of Hollywood blockbusters
are created on Linux machines and the video packages they run are quite
costly)…
but, even if you (or AMD) buy a million licenses they will not be
distributed by this community.
this forum is a place to get “technical help” with multimedia problems
you might have…(not having proprietary code included is not a
technical problem, it is a legal problem)…
suggest you PM to ask a moderator to move it to chat, soapbox or looking
for…but, i think if look there first you will find several dozens of
threads which have also gone down this path (which is a dead end).
dd@home.dk: I don’t believe MIT licensed software is proprietary software. Maybe I’m wrong, but from my knowledge it’s only proprietary when that specific code is owned by someone else and copyrighted. The fluendo codecs are open-source just like everything else in openSUSE. Patents are a different matter… they’re a clause that addresses applications regardless of who the owner is and the license of the code. The ones who own the mp3 patent don’t own fluendo’s gstreamer plugin, just a legal block on others people’s work. Flash for instance is proprietary because it belongs entirely to Adobe, copyrighted and with no free source code available. The codecs can be called restricted software, but not proprietary.
That being said, I work in open-source software for years and also care a lot about a fully open-source system (hence why those decoders qualify as ok in my list). But I admit the idea of paying a monthly fee to include something isn’t a good one nor suitable for Linux, and I should have thought about this side too before posting it. So disregard P2 from my earlier list, that was a bad idea and goes against my vision of a fully free OS too (which I want openSUSE to be). Still, I continue to support the idea of a one-time community effort to remove those restrictions.
And correct, openSUSE is a community project which I also love about it. But it also has an indirect support and connection to Novell and Attachmate, and from what I know we are partly working with them as well. My bad again if I expressed myself poorly, I believe you described it nicely.
[EDIT] Ah yes, this might be best for the general area at this point, if a moderator can move it. I posted it in Technical Help because it was a suggestion for concrete action regarding openSUSE, not just random chit-chat, but there’s probably a better place.
On 2012-09-25 14:06, MirceaKitsune wrote:
>
> Penguinclaw: I read that page last night. I was mostly aware of what the
> issue is about, but my curiosity is what can be done about it…
> hopefully more than just “nothing” on the long run. To post my ideas in
> a better order (was too tired last night to go in more detail) those are
> the things I was thinking of:
I will post another link to a similar thread in 2005, in the mail list, and the particular
email I point to is from a staffer with responsibilities on this area, so he knew what he was
talking about:
+++····························
> So, now my question: What exactly has to be done in order to build a
> legal DVD player for Linux?
>
Not much: You need only:
convince all developers of the xine project (>30) that they change the
xine license from GPL to LGPL or BSD (use alternatively the mplayer or
the ogle project or write one from scratch)) to be able to link against
the proprietary CSS stuff
sign a contract with the DVD CCA to get the official CSS technology
pay 19,000 USD a year to DVD CCA
implement the CSS technology into xine
talk to all major graphics card vendors and convince them to support
Linux and provide interfaces for the use of macrovision in Linuxplayers
implement it into the player
sign a contract with Dolby for decoding dolby 2 channel and/or
6 channel sound
pay approx. 0.8 - 1.50 USD per sold copy of the program to Dolby
(depends on sound quality and the number of sold copies)
sign a contract with MPEGLA for decoding mpeg2 video format
pay 2.50 USD per sold copy to MPEGLA (independent from numbers)
That’s all, let’s begin!
····························+±
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
Poking the thread. I’m still looking to hear more opinions on this… especially since I’m planning to email certain Linux groups / people, at least to hear what they think about a donation-based effort to un-patent those codecs. Maybe we can get something going… which is a naive thought given how difficult it is to achieve anything of this scale on a legal level. But well, it’s at least worth trying so why not
There are also some more thoughts I’ve been having here (I’m going to act like a lawyer although I’m not): What does the music / movie industry think about this? Not that I have any compassion for them after the SOPA / ACTA incidents, but it might also be in their interest for such patents to not exist. That’s because almost all songs and films on the market use these codecs. If Linux users are having a hard time to get the codecs installed, it means they might not buy their products because they can’t watch them… so this is causing them lose some Linux users as their clients. Although any Linux person should know to install these manually, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve already had cases of people returning with a DVD to the shop and saying “I can’t play this on my computer, I want my money back”. Since patenting those formats doesn’t help against the issue of “piracy” either (like DRM and other stuff are at least intended to), I see reasons for record / film houses to find themselves on the same side as us here.
Overall, I’d imagine everyone is negatively affected except those who own the patents (which is a company I haven’t even heard of before this discussion). Linux users, the companies who support Linux, and why not the entertainment industry who is more likely to lose clients? That and I saw patents for even more important things expiring in the last years, so it’s not a lost hope. And considering that (from what I know) the patent on those encoders doesn’t even exist in Europe but just the US… come on I’ll be looking more into this later since I still have a lot of Linux stuff to learn about and set up, but personally I’m keeping hope for the next years.
I’ll be looking more into this later since I still have a lot of Linux stuff to learn about and set up, but personally I’m keeping hope for the next years.