Month: September 2009

The reported comment by Richard Matthew Stallman concerning Miguel de Icaza is rumor, not news. One sentence quoted from memory by Martin Owens without context is not enough. Miguel de Icaza “is basically a traitor to the Free Software community.” Even Jason Perlow from ZDnet got confused that the context was Mono, but Martin Owens corrected this. So what is the context?

Until we know that I suggest we suspend judgment concerning it. Remember that Miguel used to work for the Free Software Foundation and now by being on the Board of Directors of the CodePlex Foundation, created by Microsoft to serve its purposes, one could argue that Miguel has gone to the dark side. From that perspective one could say that Miguel de Icaza “is basically a traitor to the Free Software community.” Here we need to draw a distinction between Free Software ideology and Open Source pragmatism.

From a pragmatic open source perspective, Miguel is no trader. He is true to the philosophy of open source which says open source is the best way to do software. Not the only way, just the best way. From the Free Software perspective such a view misses the point. Closed source software is not just inferior, but wrong. It is not a matter of best practices, it is an ethical issue. Microsoft is not only inferior, it is morally wrong. Therefore to help support the ends of Microsoft is morally wrong. So clearly we need to know the context of Richard Stallman’s comments before we beginning bashing him.

LINKS
http://doctormo.wordpress.com
http://www.osnews.com/story/22225
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Sep-23.html
http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=11167
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/27980/1090/
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090927151401988
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Oct-05.html

For those of you who hate to install all kinds of codecs just to get your Ubuntu Linux system to run multimedia, there is a bundle that you can download through your synaptic package manger called “ubuntu-restricted-extras”. This bundle currently includes:

cabextract (version 1.2-3) will be installed
freepats (version 20060219-1) will be installed
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg (version 0.10.6.2-1ubuntu2) will be installed
gstreamer0.10-pitfdll (version 0.9.1.1+cvs20080215-1ubuntu1) will be installed
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad (version 0.10.11-2ubuntu1) will be installed
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse (version 0.10.11-0ubuntu1) will be installed
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly (version 0.10.10.2-1build1) will be installed
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse (version 0.10.7-2) will be installed
liba52-0.7.4 (version 0.7.4-11ubuntu1) will be installed
libass1 (version 0.9.5-2) will be installed
libavcodec-unstripped-52 (version 3:0.svn20090303-1ubuntu2+unstripped1) will be installed
libavformat52 (version 3:0.svn20090303-1ubuntu6) will be installed
libavutil-unstripped-49 (version 3:0.svn20090303-1ubuntu2+unstripped1) will be installed
libcdaudio1 (version 0.99.12p2-7) will be installed
libcelt0 (version 0.5.1-0ubuntu1) will be installed
libdc1394-22 (version 2.0.2-1) will be installed
libdca0 (version 0.0.5-0.1) will be installed
libdvdnav4 (version 4.1.3-3) will be installed
libdvdread4 (version 4.1.3-4ubuntu2) will be installed
libenca0 (version 1.9-6) will be installed
libfaac0 (version 1.26-0.1ubuntu2) will be installed
libfaad0 (version 2.6.1-3.1) will be installed
libffado0 (version 2.0~rc1-0ubuntu2) will be installed
libfftw3-3 (version 3.1.2-3.1ubuntu1) will be installed
libfreebob0 (version 1.0.11-0ubuntu1) will be installed
libgmyth0 (version 1:0.7.1-1ubuntu1) will be installed
libid3tag0 (version 0.15.1b-10) will be installed
libiptcdata0 (version 1.0.2+libtool01-2ubuntu1) will be installed
libjack0 (version 0.116.1-3ubuntu3) will be installed
liblrdf0 (version 0.4.0-1.1) will be installed
libmad0 (version 0.15.1b-4) will be installed
libmjpegtools-1.9 (version 1:1.9.0-0.0ubuntu3) will be installed
libmms0 (version 0.4-2) will be installed
libmodplug0c2 (version 1:0.8.4-3ubuntu1.1) will be installed
libmp3lame0 (version 3.98-0.0) will be installed
libmpcdec3 (version 1.2.2-1build1) will be installed
libmpeg2-4 (version 0.4.1-3) will be installed
libmysqlclient15off (version 5.1.30really5.0.75-0ubuntu10.2) will be installed
libneon27-gnutls (version 0.28.2-6.1) will be installed
libofa0 (version 0.9.3-3) will be installed
libopenspc0 (version 0.3.99a-2) will be installed
libpostproc51 (version 3:0.svn20090303-1ubuntu6) will be installed
libquicktime1 (version 2:1.1.0+debian-1build1) will be installed
libraptor1 (version 1.4.18-2) will be installed
libsidplay1 (version 1.36.59-5) will be installed
libsoundtouch1c2 (version 1.3.1-2) will be installed
libswscale0 (version 3:0.svn20090303-1ubuntu6) will be installed
libtwolame0 (version 0.3.12-1) will be installed
libwildmidi0 (version 0.2.2-2) will be installed
libx264-65 (version 1:0.svn20081230-0.0ubuntu1) will be installed
libxml++2.6-2 (version 2.24.0-1ubuntu1) will be installed
libxvidcore4 (version 2:1.1.2-0.1ubuntu3) will be installed
mysql-common (version 5.1.30really5.0.75-0ubuntu10.2) will be installed
raptor-utils (version 1.4.18-2) will be installed
ttf-liberation (version 1.04.93-1) will be installed
ttf-mscorefonts-installer (version 2.6) will be installed
ubuntu-restricted-extras (version 31) will be installed
unrar (version 1:3.8.5-1) will be installed

Please also note that packages from multiverse are restricted by copyright or legal issues in some countries.

See http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/licensing for more information.