Ffmpeg has no copyright issues, but patent issues, which mostly only apply to US jurisdiction. The current ffmpeg shipped with Slackware (via MPlayer) tries to get around it by removing MP3, AAC and AMR encoders. But it has been overlooked, that you also have to pay patent royalties for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 decoders. So Slackware is encumbered anyway. The is no need for a "USE_PATENTS" switch, because you can't build a media player without infringing patents.

In short terms: You can't get around software patents by crippling packages. If your distribution plays anything except PCM you're doomed. Even Google VP8 and Ogg Vorbis doesn't rescue you, because the patent holders claim that these also infringe patents. YouTube had to license VP8 recently.

"Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source."

Source: http://www.vorbis.com/

That is their claim, but it may not hold up in court when some patent troll sues them for some obscure patent they pulled out of somewhere. No software is patent-free until software patents are abolished.

Yes, I used the wrong word. I should have written patent and not copyright. Thanks for the correction.

I am not so sure about the the statement that Slackware is encumbered for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 decoders. I am in no way a lawyer, but my reading suggests that for open source software that is provided without fee, then it becomes the responsibility of the end-user to obtain a licence. It could be argued that you have already paid the licence fee if you have a DVD player in your computer or use a legitimately purchased DVD or use a commercial content provider, as the supplier of the commercial product should have already paid the royalty.

Jurisdictions vary.
In Australia, I take comfort from this post. http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum...t=1126084&#r15
and this post earlier in the same thread. http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum...t=1126084&#r11

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Someone once said Slackware is for those who want to learn Linux. The Linux classes for which I set up the computer labs in the late nineties (UCI Extension) did everything from the command line. Students had to type commands to build custom kernels, set up the network interface, put up a socket and talk to each other, etc., sans gui. What they now refer to as distributions (basic Linux plus lots of pre-built packages, scripts, and all, straight into telinit 5) were referred to as training wheels or gooey for McWindoes folk. I wouldn't hire a systems administrator who didn't have Slackware console experience. Those skills are needed to fix whatever put the machine into recovery mode. But, I digress. Computers/software are tools; use the right tool for the job and you'll be fine. People who want to do stuff like "Industrial Light and Magic" don't need Slackware skills. They call a systems administrator when they can't get into their 3D tools.
A fatal flaw in any open-source endeavor is the tendency toward bloated groupware, where everybody gets to toss in their own vision of the way things should be. Slackware is not a groupware project. The Master who makes all ultimate decisions, subordinate experts manage stuff in their field of expertise, accepting bits of code from their army of volunteer programmers.

Uh, what was the question?

--
Obquote: "I'll keep that in mind, Mr. Bailey, when this becomes a democracy." -Captain Kirk, Corbomite Maneuver.

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@volkerdi said:

First of all. I think the software you include in Slackware is
reasonable. This is just a marginal note.

I remember what you said here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...3/#post4880261

I must say that's not exact. For the same reason I tried to
explain apparently without success to another popular figure
here.

Specially being you a popular figure on Linux world, the
software you say you use in the media (i.e. here, not what you
*really* use at home) is about what you think is convenient to
*promote*. That affects not only to Slackware but the whole
FOSS future.

I mean, saying "I use KDE", "I am a KDE fan" or "I use Xfce",
you are indirectly promoting some of the annoying changes
described by stf96 on the thread linked above. Perhaps not the
last word but you and we all have part of the responsibility on
the origin of that changes.

Include all the software you can, even Gnome, but coherent with
the supposed philosophy of Slackware you should promote another
use of Slackware and Linux in general. For example:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp...ontconfig/4462


I am not the owner of True, I don't believe in One True like
religious people, I don't argue to be right. But I am pretty
sure that it's not just about personal taste. It's fine and for
the benefit of all that exists *one* Ubuntu but the "out of the
box" in the long term is not a convenient strategy for Linux and
the FOSS world in general. Simplify, avoid layers of
abstraction and dependencies that just sum bugs and security
holes. Point to an economy of man power and resources. That's
the mature bet. Keep it coherent, Keep It Simple.

If all Linux users follow the out of the box way more or late
all distributions will be condemned to be the Mac or Win cheaper
option. At that point if the code is open or closed will be
irrelevant.

Walter

At least VP8 will not have problems with patents anymore: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTMyMTA

Slackware is a commercial distribution sold on DVD. Therefore it has to pay royalties. It's not a big deal, these are around one dollar per copy for decoders (not so sure abount encoders). But providing free FTP downloads can become expensive...

No, the private, non-commercial use of patents is always free.

For video your current best bets are theora, vp8, and dirac. These are the least likely to infringe. For audio, I would say opus, and vorbis.

What is sold is subscriptions. The distribution can be downloaded for free.

I'd like to see p7zip included.

No, his comment there is more like saying "I hear you." He's not advocating a certain direction in the DE world. He agrees with people's sentiment like yours. His choice is to be a distributor, packaging vanilla software that you configure your way. He distributes XFCE, and not Pat V's riced up DE. So the slackware philosophy is that if the software is included, we don't try to second guess the developers. Pat doesn't want to get into development as a distro maintainer.

So when his suggestion was if you didn't like the direction a software package is going was to take it up with the developers. I do understand that will be an exercise of frustration as they (the developers) are following the whims of other philosophies that you do not share. KDE is an example of this, leaving out a large class of users who wanted to keep things more like ver 3.5. I'll tell you what, if you can point out a DE that is mom & pop friendly, that is not horribly out of date, that we can still leverage to keep the Unix way, lets talk. As of right now, I am considering to mod XFCE to be more like what you want too, but currently studying the choices and testing things here before I will share it.

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Now I know a lot about what the3dfxdude think Patick think .

I'm not talking about sentiments. For most people a religious
believing is enough. Others judge based on facts. For me it's
the aim, the goal and the strategy what's important; two persons
can say and/or do the same and even in the same context with
different or even opposite intentions.

The more you think about your aim, goal and strategy, the more
you avoid wasting years of work to one day realize you were
going in the opposite direction:

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Mar-05.html

I complained years ago to Xfce developers about keybindings.
The result? On each new Xfce release is more difficult (if not
impossible) to configure the more stupid key binding. So if you
still find Xfce more "unix like" than Gnome or KDE wait two
years to change your mind. Are you happy configuring your
environment using an imitation (xfce4-settings-editor) of the
imitation (gconf) of the beloved and widely *praised* Windows
registry? Is that your KISS philosophy? Then let's go with
gnome3, systemd, wayland, etc.

Is your grandmother able to understand telephone numbers? Has
she some problem to distinguish international prefixes and its
function? Now ask some young person (those that would kick your
ass on any video game) about IP numbers. Why do you think that
happened? Some *friendly* interfaces was developed with the
same aim, goal and strategy than closing the code . They are
winning the battle even in the FOSS world.

The origin of the changes is all around.

Walter

.

In this particular case, as a maintainer of SBo scripts for E17 and accompanying libs, I'll readily admit that my work on this was very cheap; but that's exactly because Eric and other SBo people have provided great foundation through script templates for various standard setups, and also because E17 people are sticking to very clean, vanilla autotools based build.

@ngc891: If you have any suggestions regarding these scripts, please let me know; or, even better, if you would like to take the maintenance over, you're more than welcome (I'd only suggest that you use SBo mailing list for all of your comments in that regard - this list is the place to discuss everything SBo related, and it's pure coincidence that I've encountered this thread here at LQ, as I don't read LQ regularly). I have no particular interests in E17 except that I'm an ordinary user over number of years; as nobody else popped up to provide E17 SlackBuilds, I've uploaded them couple years ago, and kept updating them since. Indeed I haven't bothered back then to Google for scripts provided on places other than SBo, but why should I - personally, I don't care about sites providing binary packages, and on the other side, having SBO template script readily available made creating these scripts very simple, so I had no need to peek into how other people would do it.

Back on topic - I really hope that PV considers including Enlightenment back into official set of packages. E17 is pretty solid these days, is looking as good as ever, and practically there is no burden whatsoever in maintaining corresponding SlackBuilds. The only issue is that Enlightenment people are keeping corresponding foundation libraries split over 10 or so packages, but maybe these could be handled with single SlackBuild (@ngc891: or maybe you could try to exercise some of your influence to try to convince Enlightenment people to unify these in single build - if I remember it correctly, I think it was mentioned somewhere around E17 release that these libraries are going to be unified into single EFL package, but haven't happened so far).

@eloi:
(1) We all know that Patrick tries hard to offer all of us as many choices as he feels realistic considering the size of the DVD and the available workforce.
(2) I'm not that worried about DE's evolution as I don't use any (even though I use some KDE apps on the occasion, for instance). I'm more interested and possibly worried about evolution of core components of a Linux distribution. For instance I'd actually worry if startup of Slackware Linux couldn't make use of human readable shell scripts, launched in the same order every time, as it has always done (and yes, I have in mind udev's integration in systemd).
(3) If you think that known DE are going the wrong way (and you maybe right there to some extent), you still may invent a new one or fork an existing one.