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Dolby Tells NetBSD Project: Don't Decode AC3

Posted by timothy on from the snappy-letterhead dept.

Mycroft writes: "There's a new entrant into the open source DVD legal battle: Dolby Laboratories. The NetBSD Project received this letter demanding that links to the open source ac3dec package be removed. What's next?" Probably what's next are yet more letters sent to every other project which enables decoding of content on platforms unsupported by the format licensors. Remember, you don't buy anything anymore -- you license it.

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  1. Re:So Tiresome, sometimes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant
    Yetanother crippling bombshell hit the beleguerd *BSD community when last month IDC confirmed that *SD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on top of of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

    You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. NetBSD is the most endangered of them all.

    Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

    OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

    Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.

    All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick nd its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

    SD is dying