Comments on Getting the Message Out

By: Me

2007-04-03T11:07:59Z

Like I said in the original blog, Fluendo should talk with Autopackage guys (that no, aren’t only some mad guys that want Linux to be like Windows).
But looking to the only free (as free beer) plug-in, the MP3 one, I see some interesting things:
– There is a single dependency against GLIBC_2.4: __stack_chk_fail. This dependency is because the “-fstack-protector”, easily removable.
– If you remove it, the plug-in will work with GLIBC_2.1.3.

By: Chris Cunningham

2007-03-28T15:24:48Z

Well, I think it was made pretty clear. The cost-benefit ratio simply isn’t worth it, when a supermajority of those users it would potentially benefit wouldn’t be interested in compromising their freedom or their practical considerations in order to actually pay for it. These are not free software plugins, so such pragmatisms as the hourly rates of Fluendo’s build engineers become very important.

Anyway, Fluendo only support a small subset (two?) of Debian’s archs. People would be “excluded” anyway.

– Chris

By: Jeff Licquia

2007-03-28T13:06:04Z

Chris, why do I get the impression that said Venn diagram would be of the empty set? 🙂

At any rate, I would certainly be interested, and I tend to run stable until close to the next Debian release, and I have reason to believe that I’m not the only one.

I suppose I’d have more sympathy for Fluendo if there were some deficiency in glibc 2.3 they could point to. But since 2.3-built stuff works with 2.4 just fine, why exclude people?

By: Chris Cunningham

2007-03-28T12:48:55Z

For a fee of Â£5 Sterling I would be willing to produce for you a Venn Diagram, in the open digital format of your choice, of the intersection of the set of all humans who run or are planning to run Debian’s stable suite, and the set of all humans who are willing to publicly state that they would like Fluendo to sell them a limited-use license for their proprietary binary Windows Media plugins.

– Chris

By: Michael

2007-03-28T07:39:44Z

Sadly, I think most people who were using Debian on their workstation have switched to Ubuntu, which is not affected by the problem except in Dapper.

And we have also seen the start of a similar shift in the meta distribution market ( linspire, gnoppix, etc ).

There is however big deployement like Munich, and it would be interesting to see how they managed the situation with mp3 ( given the fact mp3 patents seems to be valid under german law )