On 11/08/2004 07:16:53 PM, Paul Iadonisi wrote:
On the other hand, the MP3 situation is much clearer, (though still slightly murky). Thomson Multimedia's original website regarding the MP3 patents seemed to allow for free (GPL or otherwise) *decoders*, but only charge for *encoders*. That changed when Thomson changed their website (allegedly to 'clarify' the license, not change -- what bunk) that indicated that they did not want to allow for free decoders.
My understanding was that they allowed for free decoders to end users, but not for commercial use or distribution - which is kind of odd, because an end user has to get it from somewhere - which implies a distributor. Maybe though they meant the source code could be distributed but not binaries?
I don't know.
It would *be nice* for Fedora to ship with both mp3 and aac support, decoding at least if not encoding. But hopefully that company that poured a lot of money into gstreamer will soon start selling the plugins and they can be gotten that way.
Maybe we could ask Bill Gates out of the kindness of his heart to license mp3 playback for Fedora for us? ;)
