mp3

Folks,

I've decided not to violate the GPL in Aurora. This means that I will
not be including mp3 functionality in future releases. 

I know some of you may not understand this, so I've borrowed from Mike
Harris's uber-listserv posting machine for the key points:

1) MP3 technology is patented, and requires a license of some 
   sort to be granted on paper.  This means that "we haven't sued 
   anyone yet" and "we have a note on our website" are not valid 
   legal patent license grants.  A written signed contract is 
   considered valid, whether it is granted for free, or whether 
   someone has paid a fee to obtain such a license.

2) All open source MP3 software is GPL licensed currently (at 
   least to my knowledge), and that means that whether you pay for 
   the patent licensing or not, the patent still violates the 
   GPL licensed MP3 decoder software no matter how you slice it.

GPLv2, section 7: http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl.html

This means that SuSE (err... Novell), Mandrake, Gentoo, Debian, 
and pretty much anyone besides Red Hat are violating the GPL, either 
willfully or ignorantly. Ignorance is no excuse, and willful 
violation effectively nullifies the power of the GPL.

Now, I know this sucks for the end user. I'm sorry, I've got mp3s too.
But it's the right thing to do.

~spot
---
Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa(a)redhat*com> LCA, RHCE 
Red Hat Sales Engineer || Aurora SPARC Linux Project Leader

"The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is
novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present
social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to
be published." -- Aldous Huxley


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