So to answer the thread, obviously YES, Manjaro the company affects codec support, and has and will have other effects on this community distribution.
I think this should not have happened, something is wrong in the way it is managed in my opinion, there should be a clear separation, and nothing “because of the company” should negatively affect the community distribution.
I’m not affected (yet) so I basically don’t care, but if I was, to be clear, I would not compile important system packages myself to have normal usage of my computer, I would go the easy way, and switch to Arch.
As pointed in many thread there would have been plenty of alternative solutions rather than telling people to deal with it, to use the AUR (OK come on, always the same song, you tell people AUR is not supported, but as soon as there is an issue we can read Manjaro Team members telling people to use the AUR, you’ll have to make up your mind at some point as a Team on that topic, it’s getting old now…), or compile the package themselves, or take the package from another distribution… This is really bad, a bad look for Manjaro Team, a bad experience for the user (or soon to be non Manjaro user), it is BAD.
It is the repeating issues, the lack of communication beforehand, the will of not supporting what is good for the distribution and its users (like here having basic functionalities working, with an alternative provided solution like many others do, but not only that, for instance I’m still dumbfounded by the will of not helping for MAtray when this tool is clearly a powerful one for Manjaro to spread its communication from forum and twitter easily direct to people’s desktop, and used by many people as it was once part of default installation), and so on and so on… that makes you look bad, and what drives people away from the distribution. I myself am not recommending Manjaro anymore because of all these little stuff (I don’t have the list here, but if you want I can search and compile one) that could be easily avoided, if there was some proper thought put to it beforehand, or if the team was learning from past mistakes.
The fact Manjaro is free, is driven by community of people giving time for it, doesn’t mean you are free from criticism when it looks like decisions are made by monkeys pushing random buttons and no one cares about consequences (and don’t serve me the legal thing talking point, this is not the issue here).