Fedora's way forward

[Peter Jones]

On Tue, 2006-03-28 at 05:24 -0500, sean wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 04:50:52 -0500
> "Eric S. Raymond" <esr at 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Unfortunately, this info is about 5 years out of date.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.

-- 
  Peter