[fab] Pimping Fluendo for MP3 support

[seth vidal]

On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 10:52 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> On Tue, 16 May 2006, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 2006-05-16 at 18:17 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> > > Simple, legal, solves a lot of people's problems.  At the cost of a bit of 
> > > moral high ground, but if we can educate while solving the user's problem, 
> > > maybe that's not a bad tradeoff after all.  Somnething to be said for a 
> > > good bully pulpit.
> > 
> > And if we give in here, where does it end?  Why not ship freely
> > redistributable binary apps if they "solve user problems"?  And then,
> > maybe next is binary X drivers.  
> 
> The slippery slope argument is for suckers.  :)
> 
> I'm not proposing that we "abandon all of our hard-fought moral 
> principles".
> 
> I am proposing that we make a real effort to educate people, not only 
> about the position we hold, but *why we hold it*.  Because to the vast 
> majority of people, our position seems arbitrary and stupid -- which means 
> that we're not doing a good enough job of selling it.
> 
> What if there were a big link on the default desktop that said "Do you 
> want MP3?"  And then the user clicks on a link, and the link tells a 
> story.
> 
> It tells the whole story about how Fruanhofer/Thomson basically screwed
> the entire world by suckering engineers into using the MP3 codec, and only
> *then* charging patent royalties.  It also tells the plucky story of a
> young developer named Monty who decided that MP3 was a bunch of bullshit
> and came up with his own codecs.  It tells you why Fedora chooses those
> codecs.
> 
> And then, at the end, it tells you how to get MP3 codecs legally, and 
> urges you to use those codecs to translate all of your MP3 files to OGG.
> 
> Or would that be "giving in" too much?
> 

There's no way we can provide an mp3->ogg translator w/o violating the
patent, can we?

-sv