windows migrant: choosing linux distribution

[Ian Malone]

On 2 November 2011 20:02, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 02, 2011 at 18:36:04 +0000,
>  Ian Malone <ibmalone at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Lastly, media friendliness: Fedora, again by choice, includes only
>> software that can be described as free and open source, this excludes
>> several things such as mp3 playback from the core system. There are
>> easy solutions to this these days (just set up rpmfusion), but it does
>> represent an extra level of difficulty (on the other hand, it isn't
>> really difficult and might be a useful first exercise for somebody
>> wanting to learn how things work). Ubuntu tends to include everything
>> they think they can get away with.
>
> Not not just Free software, but also unemcumbered by patents. The problem
> with mp3 software is not that there isn't Free software that that can
> encode/decode sound into the mp3 codec, but that the codec is patented
> and patent owners do not permit free redistribution of code to use it.
>

True, but I thought I shouldn't overcomplicate an already long email
by getting into a discussion about how you define free (or Free)
software. Hence 'free and open source'.

-- 
imalone