The disabling of hardware codecs in community distributions
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.
In September, the Fedora project changed how it builds the Mesa graphics library, disabling support for the H.264 and H.265 codecs. These formats are heavily encrusted with software patents and have long been difficult to support on Linux systems, though the existence of OpenH264 has improved the situation for many users. In this case, though, the patented algorithms are not being executed on the CPU running Linux; instead, they are run (and accelerated) on a peripheral processor like the GPU. With the change, Fedora users (only of the upcoming Fedora 37 release for now, though that will likely change) have lost access to the acceleration provided by their hardware.
The problem was promptly brought to the Fedora development list, where a number of users expressed their unhappiness at the change. But there was also a certain amount of surprise that Red Hat would not allow code that enables hardware functionality to be shipped; Chris Adams, for example, asked: "But isn't this just providing for hardware decoding, where (presumably) the hardware vendor arranged for whatever needed licenses?". The "presumably", in this case, turns out to be wrong.