Fedora's way forward
Eric S. Raymond
esr at thyrsus.com
Tue Mar 28 16:32:15 UTC 2006
sean <seanlkml at sympatico.ca>:
> 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...
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>
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