This morning I had a really long and interesting conversation with Aq on IRC. One of the ideas I was discussing with him was using technology to cleverly, and inoffensively, promote Free software within Linux. (For those of you who haven’t listened to the latest episode of LugRadio, Aq had been bemoaning the continuing issue of people who use Linux but aren’t necessarily using or interested in the concepts of Free Software as a whole – but more on that another time).
A good example of what I am talking about is the Restricted Drivers manager in Ubuntu. If Ubuntu has to install proprietary drivers during installation, most likely either for a graphics card, or a wifi card, then it pops up this box to inform you that it has done so. There are 3 points to note with this dialog:
1. It still works – it’s not forcing you not to use them (unobtrusive)
2. It informs – it gives you the reason _why_ proprietary drivers are bad (informative)
3. It only appears _if_ you have the (in)appropriate hardware (relevant)
I think we could use similar prompts for other areas, and one area I thought might be good would be the area of closed media formats. (I have talked a bit about this in the past – I’m not going to go into the reasons why closed media formats are bad here, but a good starting point if you’re interested would be this video about DRM (although DRM != closed formats, it’s still a hot topic ))
Thus, I propose an additional script to go into Linux that works in the following way:
1. When you plug in your media player (iPod, iRiver, Archos, some random Korean player, whatever), as part of the auto-detection it scans a database of media players to discover if it has support for Ogg Vorbis
2. If Yes, then it pops up a window (see below) confirming that Ogg is supported, and offering to convert any existing media folders from MP3 to Ogg, while giving a reason why this is a preferred option.
3. If No, then it just does the normal operations for when you plugin a media player
Note that the box has a “Never ask again for this device” option, so that it doesn’t nag you – the idea is that, like the restricted drivers manager, you only ever see this box once (per device). It also fulfills the 3 points I gave above – unobtrusive, informative, and relevant.
The table view is supposed to contain a list of folders which contain MP3 files (or other proprietary formats) and checkboxes for you to select if you want to convert them.
[edit]Oops – the image is a bit wide for my theme. Click on it to see the full thing[/edit]
Also note that this is just a mockup – there are probably a few things that could be improved upon/changed. But hopefully you get the idea.
mrBen