Fedora's way forward

[sean]

On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 11:32:15 -0500
"Eric S. Raymond" <esr at thyrsus.com> wrote:

> 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...

Well if you believe Wikipedia, the patents expire in 2010 so if we 
can just keep this debate up for four years or so....

BTW, Wikipedia also says:

"Additionally, patent holders declined to enforce license fees on 
open source decoders, allowing many free MP3 decoders to develop."

But gives no references and i've been unable to find any myself.

Sean