[TriLUG] RH8 and Evolution Problem

Bill Vinson billvinson at nc.rr.com
Sat Oct 5 23:53:34 EDT 2002


On Sat, Oct 05, 2002 at 11:00:58PM -0400, Tanner Lovelace wrote:
> On Sat, 2002-10-05 at 16:58, Kevin Sonney wrote:
> 
> > Then take it up with the lawyers. There are PATENT ISSUES with mp3
> > decoder inclusion. On distros prior to 8.0, the owner of said
> > patent didn't have an issue, and there's no clear statement that a
> > commercially released GNU/Linux Distro won't be forced to pay $.75 per
> > decoder shipped.
> 
> Kevin,
> 
> I must respectfully disagree with your above statement that
> something has changed just for 8.0.  The slashdot story,
> notwithstanding, Thompson Multimedia (or whatever the patent
> owner's name is) has stated that *nothing whatsoever* has
> changed in their patent stance.  Redhat's position just
> seems like a lot of fear mongering.  But, you know what,
> I'm actually slightly glad they did it because hopefully it
> will drive people to try something else besides Redhat. :-)

Actually, that is exactly the problem. Thompson said nothing in the
license changed in their mind, but they have opened the door to charge
all for profit companies that include mp3 decoding a license fee. What
is interesting is they say it has always been this way.  So, be it.
However, in Red Hat's defense, they have stopped including the decoding
precisely b/c Thompson says they can charge the licensing fee and have
always had that option. That is a scary thing for a company to know that
another can at any time come and demand .75 x #sold. It eats in to RH's
margins and can cause them a great deal of hurt. By not including them
now it makes it harder for Thompson to claim fees on previous versions
sold with mp3 decoding as it shows good faith on RH's part in trying to
adhere to the demands of the license and most courts I believe would
recognize that.

On another side, I think this bodes poorly as ogg is not a suitable
replacement yet. I cannot hear that much of a diff between ogg and mp3
and until hardware manufacturers (specifically in my mind, Apple's
iTunes and iPod) support Ogg then it is useless to me. Also, I am fairly
certain that Apple is either paying the license fee or is prepared to
pay it should it be necessary.

Hopefully a good codec which is widely supported and free will arise and
maybe that is ogg, but for now I will stick with what is supported and
with what works on my systems. I have already updated XMMS here under
RH8 to support mp3 and this is not enough to make me ignore RH's other
advantages for me over the likes of Mandrake...

Bill



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