dropping mp3 support in rh8

[Aaron Howell]

Its up to each individual Linux distribution as to how they respond to the changes to FHG's licensing.
My understanding of it is that the license fees need to be paid on use, not distribution.
The question then comes back to the policies of the different distribution manufacturers.
Some distributors like Debian insist that everything in their main distribution be DFSG complient
(that is free for both commercial and non commercial use).
In their case, they will most likely respond by moving all their mp3 players out into non-free and letting the users decide whether to pay the license fees or not.
In the case of Redhat they've decided to deal with it by removing mp3 altogether.
other distributions will respond differently based on their licensing policy.
FHG really though is making the same mistake Unisys did with GIF, in that they released it for free use then tried to charge a licensing fee.
Everyone laughed at them, and all it achieved was to hasten the adoption of jpeg and png as web standards (you see very few gifs out there these days).
The same will happen to mp3, this move will hasten the adoption of ogg vorbis which is a superior format anyway,
and mp3 will gradually die off. (the big blow will come when players like Winamp and MS Media Player drop support for mp3,
and lets face it, Microsoft has been wanting to do that for ages, plus handheld players will move to either WMA or OGG format).
So, IMHO not supporting mp3 is no more of a loss than not supporting gif, when there are other just as useful standards out there,
and FHG is shooting itself in the foot.
Regards
Aaron
On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 05:52:24PM -0500, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> Why is it that slackware still offers mp3 support.
> Aren't they comercial too?
> And how does a volenteer distro like debian fit into all of this?
> 
> Greg