On Tue, 2006-03-28 at 05:24 -0500, sean wrote:

On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 04:50:52 -0500 "Eric S. Raymond" esr@thyrsus.com wrote:

...

Let's start with the basics. For a consumer OS to be unable to play MP3s and handle podcasts is just plain not acceptable, not in the world after iTunes. Red Hat/Fedora's duck-and-cover on this would be understandable if the Fraunhofer patents blocked decoders, but Fraunhofer itself has only dunned for royalties on *encoders* -- thus Red Hat/Fedora has ceded to Fraunhofer rights it has never claimed.

Hmmm, well that's interesting. So it should be possible to include an open source mp3 decoder like Underbit's MAD. [1]

Unfortunately, this info is about 5 years out of date. Fraunhofer licensed the rights to Thomson Multimedia, who then made a big fuss about players. They have a published rate of $0.75US per unit for mp3 decoding software, which would have to be paid by whoever distributes the software.

Obviously this model is incompatible with Fedora Core and Extras.