Feel free to buy an MP3 decoder license and donate it to rh. http://www.mp3licensing.com/help/developer.html#1 http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm/legal/index.html http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html
That's insane.
The decoder license is $60,000. What's that? The revenue RH gets from selling 40 copies of RHEL 3 AS -- with a kernel that's so full of race conditions and deadlocks that we had to wipe our hands of it and just install mainline 2.6 (the system runs quite nicely now) and support that ought to be in the dictionary next to "worthless". It's good if you have problems like
Q: The computer doesn't turn on A: Have you looked to see if it's plugged in?
or
Q: I forgot the root password. A: Try booting with a rescue disk
But if you're unlucky enough to have kernel problems with RH (and I've had them on every RH distribution from kernel 2.2 to kernel 2.4) you're SOL. I've had great experiences with Fedora and am optimistic about RHEL 4, but I've been burned bad enough I just might install Solaris 10 on the next batch of servers I'm getting.
Perhaps RH could spend some of the money that it's not spending on quality assurance and support and buy a decoder license and put an end to this nonsense. (Granted, I don't see a 'one-time' licensing fee for the encoder and the encoder licensing really does look stiff.)
