What are consequences of "merger necessitates removal of ...

[Mike A. Harris]

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   money superceded the revenue they receive now from the patent,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