[BozemanLUG] The mind behind Linux

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

----- Original Message -----
> It is only available in MP4 format, which cannot be legally played in
> the United States with free software.  Ironic.

That is not quite accurate.  Cisco supposedly has paid royalty fees to be able to freely distribute an mp4 decoder and it is used in newer versions of Firefox I believe... or can be.  I'm not sure if Firefox ships it or not.  I installed it some time ago and don't remember the details.  Also, I think the royalty holders care more about encoding royalties than decoding... and I think they have basically had a public agreement to not seek decoding royalties for years... although that may change.

Other oddities... folks like Linux Journal (who I have left many comments on), PBS, and NPR use closed formats and codecs too... and you would think they wouldn't but they do.

I have re-encoded the video into webm (vp9/opus) if you would prefer to watch that.

https://www.montanalinux.org/files/videos/Linus_Torvalds-Ted_2016.webm

I don't think this interview with Linus is particularly insightful nor informative... and he does seem quite uncomfortable during it... but hey, it does raise his, Linux's, and git's stature to some degree doesn't it?!

Oh, BTW... I attended a presentation on software patents at LFNW and it was about how a fairly recent patent case (Alice) has theoretically invalidated a significant percentage software patents and lead to a greatly reduced number of them being filed.  I don't know if Alice could be said to apply to the various patents related to mp4 or not.  If interested, here's a recording of that talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR0QEQ3VqU0

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
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Belgrade, MT 59714
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