Bad Scene

I have been a faithful Debian user for many years, and I do love Debian with all my heart. But I often find that a certain piece of hardware or some subsystem or what have you will just not work… today. Then the next time I go rummaging around updating things, something else will drop out.

So next to my prized Debian installation I decided to install Fedora Core 3, which I’ve been using on my cranky old IBM Thinkpad laptop with great success. But guess what: as far as using Fedora to watch DVDs — obviously DVDs which I purchased fair and square with the correct region code and all — well, they don’t play out of the box, and they don’t play when you out of desperation install 100Mb of crap libraries from the core distribution, and the reason they don’t play is the unbelievable patent restrictions, whose enforcing lawyers are making all the Linux distros in the USA shit themselves in terror. To quote the Fedora Multimedia HOWTO:

Fedora won’t ship MP3-capable software because the Fraunhofer Institute’s patent license terms are not compatible with the GPL.
…
MPEG (the format used on DVDs) represents itself as an open standard, but most Linux distributions won’t ship software that read it because of blocking patents held by MPEGLA.

Right, OK. MP3s and DVDs. Yeah, who uses that kind of media? Haw, not me! So now I have to go breaking things to get it all to work. Is this truly the state of affairs in 2005 America, where freely developed software adhering to open standards can’t be distributed by decent, well-meaning people?

So then I thought, maybe there’s a slightly hardware-friendlier Debian-esque Linux OS out there… and of course I’ve been hearing about Ubuntu lately, so I took a look. And here is the same unbelievable bullshit as above.

I’m very glad I live in Europe, where I can view my own legally-purchased media on my own computer without using Windows, and without breaking the goddamn law! For now.