"systemd" and "good open source citizen" in the same sentence? Irony.

I'm a software developer. Most of the (well-paid) work I do involves communicating with others and thinking, neither of which requires more monitors.

Hear, hear. They were almost there back in the late KDE3 era but then snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with PulseAudio, KDE4, Hal/Udev/whatever, and a whole string of other half-baked turds.

Ahh, the typical "serf" response: Be content with the lease your lord offers you.

Of course it's political. It's power. Power that a whole lot of people have spent the past decade voluntarily building up, to counterbalance corporate attempts to monopolise the web.

If that work hadn't been done, and Firefox didn't have the market share -- and therefore power -- that it has today, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. Because this entire issue would have been decided behind closed doors in some boardroom at Microsoft.

We're on the brink of seeing the last piece-of-shit corporate dependency -- Flash -- removed from the web.

Anyone advocating throwing that away in exchange for some minor technical advantage is either young, stupid, or suffering from a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome.

Wake up, Serf.

What? Seems clear to me that the entire issue is that the FOSS community does not want the patented software.

Also, what is an "open source patent free license"?

You don't really know what you're talking about, do you...

I'm not familiar with this particular issue, but considering the source I'd say one would want to take this story with a big grain of salt.

I'm no fan of unions, but I think concerns that they wield some dangerous, overwhelming amount of power in our societies is misplaced in this day and age, and I have to question where people are getting the idea from and, then, why a comment like this ends up 5:Insightful.

I think it's obvious to anyone paying any attention at all these days that concerns about government manipulation, undemocratic power, etc. belong squarely with large corporations.

For example, I live in Canada, and a cursory search brought up the following list of top lobbyists, the majority of whom represent large, destructive corporations (oil, mining, etc.). I don't think I saw a single union on there.

http://www.thehilltimes.ca/page/view/.2009.february.16.top_lobbyists_2009

More links to data appreciated.

For the love of christ, this site should know better.

The "much-needed" part is old FUD. With the possible exception of some pro applications, the free codecs punch their weight just fine nowadays.

If your device or software doesn't play them, install one of these and complain to $company_trying_to_lock_you_in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux