This is not a SFW instance. NSFW communities will be tagged, and efforts will be made to keep SFW communities clean, but proceed at your own comfort level.
It has never been a “legal headache”, more of a bit of additional work for distro maintainers (to keep codecs separate from the rest of the distro) and a tiny inconvenience for users (they had to click an additional button after installing the distro).
Nowadays it’s almost entirely irrelevant. Unless you are in a tiny minority of users who need to play DivX-encoded video (a codec which is 25 years old at this point) for some reason, you don’t need to care at all.
Basically, this just made life of a few media horder nerds a tiny bit more convenient. Frankly i shouldn’t be typing out a comment this long to even explain it…
It has never been a “legal headache”, more of a bit of additional work for distro maintainers (to keep codecs separate from the rest of the distro) and a tiny inconvenience for users (they had to click an additional button after installing the distro).
Was that ever? Whenever someone whined about codecs back in the day, I would just install mpv or vlc (which were and are in most official distro repos I know of) and call it a day.
Is it somehow important for Linux?
No.
It has never been a “legal headache”, more of a bit of additional work for distro maintainers (to keep codecs separate from the rest of the distro) and a tiny inconvenience for users (they had to click an additional button after installing the distro).
Nowadays it’s almost entirely irrelevant. Unless you are in a tiny minority of users who need to play DivX-encoded video (a codec which is 25 years old at this point) for some reason, you don’t need to care at all.
Basically, this just made life of a few media horder nerds a tiny bit more convenient. Frankly i shouldn’t be typing out a comment this long to even explain it…
Was that ever? Whenever someone whined about codecs back in the day, I would just install mpv or vlc (which were and are in most official distro repos I know of) and call it a day.
Not for linux itself, no, but for desktos distros it makes it hard to keep it fully open source and free of proprietary stuff.
I don’t actually remember when it was the last time I heard about divx. 10-15 years ago? I think that the title is clickbait and overdramatization.
It’s an xda-dev article. Of course the title is over-dramatized clickbait.