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Comment by paulintrognon | Hacker News Reader

Can someone here please explain to me what the issue is? Firefox downloads non-free binaries in order to read some codecs by default, and this issue states that firefox should not download the codec by default because it is non-free, which is against debian's philosophy, is that correct?

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Yes, although notably this is about black-box DRM systems, not just your run-of-the-mill video codecs.

Standard versions of Firefox include non-free components by default because most users expect Netflix to work. ("Free" means "open source" in this context.)

Debian repositories (that aren't named "non-free") are supposed to contain only free software, so the Debian-packaged version of Firefox needs to be stripped of any non-free components. Should any slip through, that's a critical bug as far as Debian is concerned.

I don't think there's an issue here, it's just two projects with different goals proceeding as they're supposed to. We can have a discussion about all the things wrong with Encrypted Media Extensions and the like, but it's somewhat beside the point unless Firefox gains way more marketshare.

What technical reason is there for Firefox to dynamically download these libraries instead of bundling them at built time? It leads to bugs such as this one.

Licensing. Cisco has an all you can eat distribution license for the codec, so Firefox downloads from Cisco to piggyback on the Cisco license. If Firefox bundled it Mozilla would need a distribution license, and that's expensive.

Because if the user doesn't use netflix, you don't have to bother them with widevine or EME, it's not even installed. It only gets installed if necessary and Mozilla can ship the occassional update without having to wait for distro maintainers, preventing Netflix from not working.

Pretty sure its up to Debian to repackage and modify software to meet their standards. Not for app developers to somehow comply with every bizarre packaging policy each Linux distribution cooks up.

That as it may be, "why is this component downloaded separately" is a fair question to ask. (Sibling comments have proposed some answers.)

Note the two binaries are downloaded for two different reasons. OpenH264 is actually free and open source software in terms of copyright, the binary is simply downloaded from Cisco's servers rather than Mozilla's to comply with the H.264 patent license. It's worth noting that in general, Debian disregards patent licenses - they ship ffmpeg with many patent encumbered formats enabled, for example.

On the other hand, Widevine is actually proprietary DRM.

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