"expected gains in market share"

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller]

On Wed, 2006-04-05 at 20:41 -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Cam <camilo at mesias.co.uk>:
> > If support for iTunes is a real requirement, then *all* linux distros 
> > will be unable to provide something that even comes close. Pester Apple 
> > for a linux iTunes...
> > 
> > If basic mp3 support is the requirement, then *all* linux distros (with 
> > some minor tweaks, sure) will do the job. I'm sure J Random would back 
> > me up on that.
> 
> Hm.  I was under the impression that the iTunes format was essentially
> a DRM wrapper around MP3 and that stripping it off ore re-applying it 
> isn't hard.  I guess I must have that wrong?

Yes, you have that very wrong. First of all with laws like DMCA
'stripping it off' would be illegal. We do not agree with the law, but
it is the law at least in the US, but also many EU countries are these
days rolling out DMCA like laws. No idea about the rest of the world.
It is also not easy at all I think to strip it off even if you are in a
place without DMCA, sharpmusique and friends don't actually strip it
off, instead they grab the music from the iTunes store before the DRM is
applied.

As others has mentioned the format in question is not mp3, but AAC.
The license fees and terms for this can be found here:
http://www.vialicensing.org/products/mpeg4aac/license.terms.html

Even if Red Hat coughed up the money to support AAC they would still be
unable to legally support Fairplay as Apple has disallowed anyone else
from licensing/using it.

And as I have mentioned before. As soon as you start bundling a licensed
technology like this then you can't have any of your GPL applications
use it.

My suggestion is that instead of continuing this, by this time
repetitive and boring discussion, you instead buy yourself a copy of
RHEL Workstation which do come with support for some properietary
formats including mp3 afaik. If you are missing some formats then you
can complain as paying customer to Red Hat customer support.

Christian