Fedora's way forward
David Cantrell
dcantrell at redhat.com
Tue Mar 28 16:45:19 UTC 2006
Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> 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...
Ease up on the asterisks...
IANAL, but I see the one time royalty fee as something that wouldn't
work for a project like lame or any other MP3 software project. The fee
isn't even stated, they just give a range of $50K to $60K USD. And it's
listed for PC software applications. What does that mean? Use their
software/library/sdk? Could the project continue to release MP3
decoding and encoding code? Does it mean link in an object file that
Fraunhoffer provides? What happens if lame is incorporated in to a
Fedora-derived distribution that then runs on the iPod?
Dangerous grounds.
--
David Cantrell
Red Hat / Westford, MA
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