Roku—Breaking the Linux Not Invited Rule

I fear that this situation will never improve.

We see it everywhere, there are lots of companies that take Linux
just because it costs them nothing, but they use it for closed solutions
where they don't give anything back to the community.

For example some gamming studios have released Linux games just as an experiment,
but then dropped the support for the sequels (Neverwinter Nights is a good example).

Then we have the media formats that will never be open, but are the ones being used
by the industry because of the tooling support they have.

Finnally we have companies creating hardware solutions that run Linux, but which
provide only Windows drivers to talk with them.

The mini laptops is also a good example, we thought that now it was finally the time
that Linux would be in the hands of normal users, only to see it vanish from 90% of
the current offers.

I like Linux a lot, and used to dream of the day when I could use it for all my
daily tasks, but I think that will never arrive, mainly because of the lack of
proper multimedia support.

I own a Q-See Security Monitoring DVR which claims to run "VIRUS FREE" Linux but it cannot be accessed with Firefox, only IE. Monitoring app is also Windows only. There is plenty of stuff that runs Linux but only supported on Windows platform like many of the navigation devices. Maybe GNU should put in a clause in there license(s) for anyone using Linux kernel in there devices to provide FIRST CLASS support to people running Linux, then maybe we can talk about taking Linux mainstream.

My understanding is that Netflix uses Microsoft WMA DRM. WMA DRM can be licensed on Linux for about $0.75 a box. The existence of this royalty prevents the codec form being freely redistributed. Roku has to pay it for each box. Via unknown means the WMA codecs are in the Medibuntu repositories. Bottom line, it is a licensing problem, not a technical one.

Load the WMA codecs from Medibuntu and sniff a Netflix URL. I suspect you can get the movies to play on Linux.

The real controversy here should be that players and services continue to use DRM, not that they use DRM on top of Linux (which is perfectly legal). There has been some movement to prevent the use of open source software in devices and systems that lock things down to enable DRM, but this is futile and a waste of time, and trying to prevent such use will have negative consequences for the platform overall.

Better focus should be spent on getting the word out that these devices use DRM and to tell people not to use them. The problem of course is that most people do not care about DRM when things work correctly, and companies have worked hard to ensure that problems do not happen so that users remain uninterested in the potential problems DRM brings.

So if it's running linux, where's the source?