On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 19:32, Craig White wrote:
Yes, but for many things you take for granted under commercial OS's like playing music and videos you'll have to do some non-obvious and legally questionable things to do the same on Linux.
'legally questionable' is in my opinion overly dramatic. The fact is that there is restrictive licensing issues which packagers don't distribute with GPL and similar licensed packages.
Which means that if you obtain them from the places that do distribute them you may be violating the law. That sounds just appropriately dramatic in my opinion.
Perhaps a better way of looking at these things is that the open standards are supported out of the box and the non-open standards have to be added after original installation for those that wish to use proprietary and restrictive licensed software.
Adding proprietary and restrictively licensed software isn't a problem by itself if some company is handling the required license fees. I assume this would be the case for Real's MP3 player, but where do you find a strictly-legal DVD player even if you are willing to pay for it?