Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/910978/

Software patents affect our systems in many ways, but perhaps most
strongly in the area of codecs — code that creates or plays back audio
or video that has been compressed using covered algorithms. For this
reason, certain formats have simply been unplayable on many Linux
distributions — especially those backed by companies that are big
enough to be worth suing — without installing add-on software from
third-party repositories. One might think that this problem could be
worked around by purchasing hardware that implements the patented algorithms,
but recent activity in the Fedora and openSUSE communities shows that life
is not so simple.