In 2003/4 Mandriva, then called Mandrake, was my favourite Linux distro and was probably the easiest to use out of the various distros which I'd tried up to that point. I think that even back then they were having financial difficulties, and I don't think that much has changed about their financial predicament since.
As this video suggests, trying to get users to pay for things which in other distros "just work" is the sign of a bad business model. Technically they're perfectly within their rights to charge for Gstreamer or other software components, since it's kosher to charge for free software if that's what you want to do. However, they would be much better off if the paying element was concentrated on product differentiating applications or services. Canonical does this with Ubuntu One and their music store, so there are existing precedents. If basic multimedia functionality which is nothing new appears to be broken or have a paywall in front of it, then users are just going to move along to the next non-blocking distro - I know I would.
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2 comments:
They are not charging for gstreamer, you can download it through the package manager. One of my first thing is to uninstall codeina, 'cause I don't need it.
As Norbi says, it's not trying to charge you for Gstreamer. It's offering you some particular Gstreamer codecs. Specifically, the ones Fluendo wrote and also sells directly, here:
http://shop.fluendo.com
They're not free because they're licensed for the US patents that affect these particular codecs. You're basically paying for a patent license.
If you live in the US, this is the only legal way you can use these codecs in Linux. If you live anywhere else, you're wasting your money buying the Fluendo codecs, and you'd be better off enabling the PLF repository (Google it) and installing unlicensed implementations of the same codecs from there.
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