LinuxLinks Review
(8/8/07)
By Kevin E. Glosser
Fedora and the Free Software Movement
Fedora takes great pride in its ties to the Free software movement.
The Fedora Project has taken a firm stance against providing software
that they deem to not be “free”.
“Free” as in free to run in
any fashion, study if desired, copy, modify, improve or distribute
without further restrictions being applied. The
movement is noble, however, the embodiment of it does not come
without discomfort. The reality is you will probably come across some
proprietary application or protocol you might wish to use. If you're
a Fedora user you will not have the software installed to do it, by
default. Of course, you can always add it, but that presents a
dilemma. Why use a distribution that clearly frowns upon such
behavior? Or does it? With the release of Fedora 7 and the tools to
tailor the distro to your liking, is it now expected? Still, why not
embrace the movement and disregard software that isn't free. Some
might argue how truly free Fedora is in the first place, I'm not
going there. I'm examining the state of free software in Fedora and
Linux noting how the day may soon arrive, if it hasn't already, where
using totally free software doesn't come with much of a compromise.
With the myriad of successful open source
projects like Open
Office, Firefox,
Thunderbird,
GNOME, GIMP,
to name a few, it's easy to argue
life is good in the free software world. Many, if not all of these
applications meet or exceed the performance of their proprietary
counterparts. It's typically media formats that require compromise in
Linux, video in particular. If you want to use the latest video
codecs for movies, you're going to have to install non-free software.
Windows media formats, along with Apple's Quicktime tend to be the
most commonly used. Totem,
the included movie player in Fedora 7,
does not play the latest movie file formats. In fact, I'm not sure
what it plays because every movie format I tried would not work in
it. I'm sure it plays the open formats, but as far as proprietary
formats I assume none. If you want to view movies encoded in these
formats you're pretty much forced to install xine
or Mplayer along
with the corresponding codecs. The alternative is to be
unable to
view most movies. Taking the high road results in a compromise, a
major one in this category.
When
it comes to audio, the story is different. The Fedora team makes a
good argument against the use of the MP3 format. They note it's not a
superior product, it's just what's commonly used. The preferred format
in Fedora is called Ogg Vorbis. Ogg Vorbis is completely
free, whereas MP3 is not. A large number of organizations have
patents claiming ownership of the MP3 encoding format placing
restrictions on its use. In practice, free audio formats are not only
an acceptable solution they are superior. Many people rip their own
music from CD's they own, storing it in a format of their choosing.
When I rip music from my CD's, I now use Ogg Vorbis. There are
advantages to doing it. Not only does all the software in Fedora
support it, some interesting features become active with open
formats. For instance, in GNOME if you open the Nautilus file browser
and take your mouse and simply hover over a Ogg Vorbis encoded file,
it will immediately begin playing it. This feature is not new to
GNOME 2.18, but it's definitely a cool way to preview or play a song.
In addition, due to the format itself being superior to MP3, file
sizes are smaller with Ogg Vorbis. You can store more music in the
same space at the same quality. Or, you can improve the quality and
still take up the same amount of disk space as your current MP3
collection. With a little effort switching to free audio is an
advantage.
The biggest disappointment to me in the free
software category in
Fedora 7 was the included JRE (Java Runtime Environment). You know
Java, that wonderful technology promised by Sun that allows Java code
to be run on any platform! Ahem. Well, that's dependent on how the
JRE is written for your platform. In this case, it was unable to run
a Java app I frequently use. I connect to the Internet Chess Club
using a Java app called Jin. It would not run under the included JRE.
I had to go and get Sun's JRE. It would be nice if someday this
wasn't necessary. Whether the cause of the issue is the JRE, Java or
choices made by the programmer, it's a scenario not dealt with well
in the free software movement yet. I've tried using the free JRE in
previous versions of Fedora with the same disappointing results. If
you have Java software you want to run, you're probably going to have
to go and get Sun's JRE. It's not a difficult thing to do, but it
falls into the compromise category.
Making
your own version of Fedora
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