On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 09:14 -0500, Paul A. Houle wrote:
On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 11:58:26 +0100, Iago Rubio iago.rubio@hispalinux.es wrote:
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
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.)
it's worse actually. If RH coughed up the $60k we still can't ship it, since all MP3 decoders are GPL licensed. And the GPL doesn't actually allow you to ship code only YOU have a patent license for; you need a patent license for everyone and every possible derived work of that code..... which the licensing guys aren't actually providing.