Re: mp3

Hi Spot,

You gotta do what you gotta do.  I don't have much of a problem with it. 
  In the case of Redhat 9, someone quickly made available a third party 
rpm that activated mp3 decoding in xmms, which is where I was using mp3 
  playback most.  I would imagine some clever Aurora user will do the 
same for the rest of the community after you make the change, and all 
will be as it was.

-charles

Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:
> 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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