What are consequences of "merger necessitates removal of ...
Mike A. Harris
mharris at redhat.com
Thu Oct 9 07:54:42 UTC 2003
On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, Maynard Kuona wrote:
>I sometimes wish Redhat would just buy the license. It is becoming very
>inconvenient for us. With fedora now merged with Redhat, we now have to
>get these somewhere else. Can these not be hosted outside US, as a
>temporary measure until the issue is resolved, because it needs to be. I
>am no longer encoding my cds into mp3, but I have so many mp3's, it is a
>hassle to to this nicely with Redhat. How much does the license cost. Is
>it not $50,000 for the perpetual license.
As has been discussed to death many times for about 2 years, the
GPL explicitly disallows patented stuff from being included in
software under the GPL license. As such, even if Red Hat were to
purchase a patent license, it would be useless because *ALL* of
the open source MP3 software out there is GPL licensed (in
violation of the license due to patented bits being used).
In other words, the GPL license on all MP3 software out there is
invalid, regardless of wether or not Red Hat would have a license
to ship MP3 decoding technology. Red Hat would have to either:
1) Convince the patent owner to permit unlimited unrestricted use
of their patent(s) in GPL licensed software - either for free
or by paying them money, and they would most likely want a
hell of a lot more money than $50000 in order to permit legal
usage of the patent in GPL software, and thus make all OSS MP3
players out there legal. The patent owner would have to be
convinced in some manner that they stand to benefit
financially from doing so. Since this would more likely than
not, kill any revenue streams they receive from companies out
there that do currently license their patents, in my opinion,
it would be very unlikely for this to happen unless the sum of
money superceded the revenue they receive now from the patent,
and any revenue they'd be likely to receive from it for many
years. Such a sum of money would very likely supercede any
value Red Hat would receive from fronting the money IMHO. It
would more or less be a charity donation for all intents and
purposes, and would make stockholders uncomfortable to say the
least.
or
2) Pay the $50000 to license the patent, and then purchase or
license existing proprietary MP3 technology from some company
such as Winamp. This would be including binary only software
in the distribution, which is directly opposite of the goals
of Red Hat, and of the Fedora Project.
or
3) Pay the $50000 to license the patent, and hire developers to
write brand new MP3 decoding software, or write it internally,
either of which would be a very expensive prospect, and would
have to be under a non-OSS license as well unless the
patent license grant permitted an OSS compatible license of
some kind, which would be unlikely IMHO.
Both option 2 and 3 are contrary to the goals of the Fedora
Project.
Of course, I'm not really saying anything here that hasn't been
said about 20 million times over the last 2 years or so, but it
seems it can never be said enough times, as there's always
someone new out there who isn't aware of the issues involved, and
thinks it is a simple thing to just toss a couple bags of spare
change over the counter.... Not the case.
--
Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat
More information about the fedora-test-list
mailing list