Fw: [Audacity-devel] [Audacity-help] Fedora Core Audacity w/o MP3 "support"

[Dan O'Brien]

According to the Audacity developers, libmad is not patent encumbered
and it should be possible for Fedora Core to distribute libmad and compile
Audacity against it.

I've contacted the libmad developers to get their take.

I'm going to foward another email from them next.

I appeal to the Fedora Extra gods to reconsider libmad and Audacity
so that us mere mortals not have to recompile Audacity with MP3 support.
This leads to a messy system per my bugzilla report.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=196981

Rgds,
 
Dan O'Brien, dmobrien_2001 at yahoo.com
Phone: 614-783-4859

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Richard Ash <richard at audacityteam.org>
To: Dan O'Brien <dmobrien_2001 at yahoo.com>
Cc: David Avery <daa at rm.incc.net>; audacity-help at lists.sourceforge.net; audacity-devel at lists.sourceforge.net; richard at audacityteam.org
Sent: Sunday, July 2, 2006 1:51:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Audacity-devel] [Audacity-help] Fedora Core Audacity w/o MP3      "support"

Dan O'Brien wrote:
> Thanks, I understand the MP3 patent issue.
> XMMS, mplayer, and others be compiled and ship unencumbered and
> by adding libraries outside of the formal vendor distributions
> and then they support MP3.
> Why can't audacity work similarly so the distributions can ship the
> unencumbered
> code and allow the end user the choice of adding the required
> libraries instead of recompiling the source code.

The can do. Libmad is not patent encumbered, and LAME is not required to
build audacity. Therefore any distribution can supply audacity compiled
with libmad support and with the DLL-loader interface set up ready to use
LAME. This is not at any point patent encumbered (it's the way Windows
binaries of audacity are shipped). The user can then obtain libmp3lame.so
and use it if they so wish, or have a fully functional editor without MP3
exports without it.

Every other distro that ships audacity does this without problems.

Richard Ash

> ----- Original Message ----
> From: David Avery <daa at rm.incc.net>
> To: audacity-help at lists.sourceforge.net;
> audacity-devel at lists.sourceforge.net
> Cc: Dan O'Brien <dmobrien_2001 at yahoo.com>; richard at audacityteam.org
> Sent: Saturday, July 1, 2006 9:43:24 PM
> Subject: Re: [Audacity-devel] [Audacity-help] Fedora Core Audacity w/o MP3
> "support"
>
> Richard Ash wrote:
>> On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 18:24 -0700, Dan O'Brien wrote:
>>> I reported this bug to Fedora Core support:
>>>
>>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=196981
>>>
>>> They won't provide Audacity with MP3 support "compiled" saying that
>>> it requires libmad which makes it tainted with regards MP3 patents.
>>>
>>> >From the Audacity FAQ it seems this is contrary to Audacity's original
>>> intent to be able to handle MP3 but not directly ship patent encumbered
>>> code.
>>>
>>> Who's right?
>>
>> The two comments relate to different code, and the bugzilla entry is
>> failing to distinguish them.
>>
>> libmad (http://www.underbit.com/products/mad/) is not covered by any of
>> the MP3 software patents to my knowledge. As an MP3 DECODER only it is
>> certainly not covered by the Thompson patents surrounding MP3 ENCODING
>> software.
>>
>> LAME (http://lame.sourceforge.net/) is an MP3 ENCODING library, and as
>> such subject to the Thompson AG patents in such jusidictions as they are
>> valid - basically in the US, not in quite a lot of Europe at the moment.
>>
>> libmad is required to IMPORT MP3 files, and is a compile-time option
>> when building audacity. This does not to the best of our knowledge
>> infringe any software patents and can be freely distributed.
>>
>> LAME is required only to EXPORT MP3 files, and is a run-time option.
>> This means that it is always enabled in the binary, but does not work
>> without the libmp3lame.so library installed. This is a choice that the
>> user can make if they can legitimately obtain and use the LAME library
>> in their jurisdiction.
>>
>> To say Audacity has "MP3 Support" is therefore misleading  - there are
>> two separate options, to enable MP3 IMPORTING via libmad, and to enable
>> MP3 EXPORTING via LAME.
>>
>> Regardless of the enable/disable libmad options you can always use LAME
>> for exporting at runtime, and there is not a patent issue with linking
>> audacity against libmad for importing.
>>
>> Richard Ash
> see: http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html
>
> MP3 requires minimum payment of US$ 15000.00 / year for software
> encoders or decoders. decoders are US$0.75 / unit  or US$50,000.00
> onetime. encoders are US$2.50 per unit. and they will not allow
> redistribution.
>
> fedora is therefore unable to ship _any_ MP3 encoding or decoding software
>
>
>
>
>
>