Red Hat has delayed the upcoming release of their new desktop oriented Linux until January due to problems licensing codecs, according to Yahoo News. For some time, getting free and legitimate codecs for Linux has been a problem. While most distros make it very easy to download the codecs required to play proprietary media formats, these codecs are basically illegal in the US. It is possible to purchase legal codecs and most commercial Linux distros do include legal codecs, but there are still many users out there who will not bother to get legal codecs until they are free.

Due to Red Hat citing codec licensing difficulties as the reason for the delay, it appears that they plan to include legal codecs in their upcoming release, which will, apparently, be freely available. If Red Hat does plan to release a free Linux with legal codecs, it could cause a lot of people to consider Red Hat as an alternative. If, however, the release is not truly free (you must pay for support or something like that) then there is not much new here.

(If someone can say for sure if the release will indeed be fully free, please post a comment. I cannot find anything that specifically says you will not have to pay for support or something like that.)

I have contacted Red Hat and asked them to clarify. I will update this as soon as I get a response.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Distros, Enterprise Linux, Future of Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.