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0 pointsblasdel16y ago0 comments

Apple (QT) and Microsoft (DirectShow) pay the license fees when they distribute their Operating Systems.

Nobody gives a shit about distributing the x264 source code, and only the fosstards even have a hiccup about distributing binaries, especially from hosts outside the US. Ubuntu may not ship with the gstreamer plugin, but it does prompt you to download it the first time it's asked for by an application.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

notauser16y ago· 2 in thread

- The 'fosstards' built and shared a good deal of the ecosystem on which the Internet you are using runs.

- A large chunk of the rest is directly or indirectly enabled, possible or cheaper thanks to them.

- Every one I have met in person has been polite about their goals, and while they base them on fundamental principles I don't quite agree with, their reasoning as based on those principles is rock solid.

As such I think they deserve a little more respect than being called names, especially here. When was the last time you saw a start-up that used no FOSS software?

blasdelOP16y ago

The 'fosstards' aren't generally writing the Free Software I use -- they're hanging out in debian-legal and harassing people over petty imagined issues and doing more than anyone else to promote strong intellectual property rights (especially Software Patents: you don't weaken something by anal-retentively respecting it).

The vast majority of people writing GPL software do not align with the FSF's ideology, the GPL2 is just the most practical for their needs. Note how noone outside their core commune has switched to the GPL3, and how noone actually deeds the copyright for their random projects to the FSF like they recommend in the license text?

The only hard-GNU software I (and most others here) really use are GCC, coreutils, bash, and readline. Incidentally I'm hoping to be able to ditch all the first three in the near future for quality reasons mostly borne of FSF-pigheadedness (though I would like to swap out readline when that's the only GPL lib in a program). If I switch back to a Mac I'll be able to use better alternatives for all of them quite soon.

Sanguinez16y ago

Any stats to back up your wild claims and non-sense assumptions?

wmf16y ago

Sorry, my US bias is showing. I totally forgot about the "screw patents and just ship it from Europe" solution.

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