ffii.org) is a group ???dedicated to establishing a free market in information technology,
by the removal of barriers to competition.??? The FFII maintains an excellent FAQ page to answer
questions surrounding software patents and how they threaten innovation:
www.ffii.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions_about_software_patents
Other Potentially Litigious Issues
Particularly contentious legal issues surround audio and video software. In Red Hat Linux 8, Red
Hat, Inc. removed support for MP3 and DVD players because of questions about licensing associated
with those music and movie formats. Red Hat??™s advice at the time was to download and install
the players yourself for personal use. Red Hat didn??™t want to distribute those players because companies
owning patents related to certain audio and video encoders might ask Red Hat to pay licensing
fees for distributing those players (see www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_80mm.html).
To deal with the issue of running proprietary codecs in Linux, Linux distributions such as Fedora,
Ubuntu, and others are offering tools to connect their users to sites where they can find legal
codecs to use with Linux. See Chapter 8 for information on getting legal software for playing proprietary
music, video, and other multimedia content.
Pages:
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148