Fitting the battle of life

I own an iPod.
Because my mother bought it for me when I finished school. I don’t have rockbox on it because I did buy a couple of songs from the iTunes store which are drm’d (I also bought some iTunes ‘plus’ songs which are drm-free), and while they’re not the best songs in the world, I do still want to be able to listen to them!

I use Flash.
Because half the internet would be unavailable to me. Yes, I know there’s gnash, but I’m not sure if it’s stable enough for my browsing habits - anyone with experience here would be welcome to leave their experiences in comments below :)

I have most of my music in mp3 rather than ogg.
Simply a relic of my Windows days - and given that iPods don’t support ogg, I’ll unfortunately be sticking with mp3 for the foreseeable future. I do use my iPod quite a lot, so it makes sense to keep doing this. If and when my nano breaks, well, perhaps I’ll be buying a more Linux-friendly player, and then start moving to ogg. What do I mean, ‘perhaps’? Of course I will.

I use the restricted ati driver.
Because Hardy told me to. Would that all graphics cards would come with open-source drivers, but alas, it isn’t (yet) the case.

I use Skype.
It’s simply very good at what it does, and isn’t interoperable with other voip networks. Various people I know use Skype, and so do I. If a lot of people I knew used something else, or there was a compatible open-source programme, I’d use that. I still use a hotmail account for MSN chats, although I do use Pidgin for those.

Am I a freedom hater? No, I’m just pragmatic.

The latest Skype for Linux beta adds video support, finally enabling Linux users across the globe to benefit from the same features as the rest of their Skype buddies. Skype, however, is non-free software in that it’s closed source (although it’s free in the free beer sense, it’s not free as in freedom). Does this mean we shouldn’t welcome this development?

Well, it sends a clear message to other companies (notably, the BBC) that services can and should be given equally across operating systems, that Linux users are an important sector of the market. This is true especially for peer-to-peer applications such as Skype and the BBC’s iPlayer - the more users on a network, the better quality service had by all. For Skype, this move might mean adding several thousand users to its network with more reliable, stable PCs; this is particularly important when we bear in mind the big Skype outage over the summer, when Microsoft sent out an upgrade that required Windows users to restart their computers. With so many people doing this at the same time, the Skype network couldn’t cope; more Linux users would help in situations like this.

As for the BBC and its iPlayer service, the benefits are greater. At present, unlike with Skype, there are no Linux users. Given that there are quite a few across the country (see recent media coverage about this one…), it would be adding quite a few new users to the network. For existing users who find that the p2p service eats up their processor’s power, it would lessen the load and improve service at the same time. For Linux users themselves, it would offer the same service that the BBC is providing to Windows users - downloadable content, rather than the planned streaming service (which is inherently unfair, and probably against the BBC’s charter).