Eric S. Raymond wrote: > sean <seanlkml@xxxxxxxxxxxx>: > > Well, Fraunhofer has this page: > > > > http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm/licensing/index.html > > > > Which links to : > > > > http://www.mp3licensing.com/ > > > > Which definitely shows royalty fees for decoders. > > It does. I stand corrected. > > The page says $50K one time flat fee for a decoder. Is there any good > reason Red Hat shouldn't simply buy that license for some outfit with > a track record, like the lame developers? MP3 problem solved, > relatively cheaply (e.g., less than half the annual cost ofjust one > additional full-time coder). > > Yes, I know feeding patent parasites is unpleasant. But we come back to > the central question here: do we want ideological purity at the expense of > victory, or do we want actual victory so that *we* get to effectively set > the terms of software development in the future? > > I know which side of that question *I* come down on... Ease up on the asterisks... IANAL, but I see the one time royalty fee as something that wouldn't work for a project like lame or any other MP3 software project. The fee isn't even stated, they just give a range of $50K to $60K USD. And it's listed for PC software applications. What does that mean? Use their software/library/sdk? Could the project continue to release MP3 decoding and encoding code? Does it mean link in an object file that Fraunhoffer provides? What happens if lame is incorporated in to a Fedora-derived distribution that then runs on the iPod? Dangerous grounds. -- David Cantrell Red Hat / Westford, MA -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
