[$] The disabling of hardware codecs in community distributions

Software patents affect our systems in many ways, but perhaps moststrongly in the area of codecs - code that creates or plays back audioor video that has been compressed using covered algorithms. For thisreason, certain formats have simply been unplayable on many Linuxdistributions - especially those backed by companies that are bigenough to be worth suing - without installing add-on software fromthird-party repositories. One might think that this problem could beworked around by purchasing hardware that implements the patented algorithms,but recent activity in the Fedora and openSUSE communities shows that lifeis not so simple.