Quoting Shriramana Sharma :

On 8/19/05, robbinsc@email.arizona.edu wrote:

...

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/update/9.3/rpm/i586/xmms-lib-mad-1.2.10-68.i586.rpm

Is this file only 85209 bytes or do I have a download problem?

No, it really is that small. -Chris

One thing I am curios about is why did they take out mp3 support in the first place?

El Jueves, 18 de Agosto de 2005 21:30, Dan Gordon escribió:

On Thursday 18 August 2005 2:53 pm, Buddy Lindsey wrote:

...

One thing I am curios about is why did they take out mp3 support in the first place?

I believe because the codecs are not gpl. Most distros are doing this.

Who says MAD is not GPL? http://www.underbit.com/products/mad/ Just read the 3rd paragraph: "MAD has the following special features: [...] available under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL)" Perhaps the problem is related to the MP3 patent there's in the USA. AFAIK that's why Fedora removed it. Suse is being developed in Europe, but Novell is USA-based so perhaps that's the problem. If they want to sell Suse in USA they may: a) remove support for MP3 or b) pay millons of dollars to the MP3 patent holders to get a license Obviously there's no choice. Releasing a version for the USA without MP3 support and another for the rest of the world with MP3 support could be an option but it's much harder and more costly than just providing MP3 support packages through YaST Online Update. -- Víctor Fernández Martínez Gabinete de prensa de PoLinux [www.polinux.upv.es]. Usuario de Linux registrado #312284 en http://counter.li.org.

Exactly and that is why you wont find anything to do with mp3 in the main stream of any recent distro. But it is usually not to hard to have support for it if you really want it.

The problem is that it needs to be easy to get or work out of the box. If mad is GPL'd then why not use it out of the box for mp3 support?

Well what would it take to get mad to be included? On 8/18/05, Dan Gordon wrote:

On Thursday 18 August 2005 6:23 pm, Buddy Lindsey wrote:

...

...

Exactly and that is why you wont find anything to do with mp3 in the main stream of any recent distro. But it is usually not to hard to have support for it if you really want it.

The problem is that it needs to be easy to get or work out of the box.

If mad is GPL'd then why not use it out of the box for mp3 support?

Good question, like I said I dont think its well enough known about, as soon as you mention mp3 every one thinks lame or whatever else has been around for some time. So maybe we need to convince the powers that be that its ok to include this package.

Regards, Dan Gordon -- Thu Aug 18 20:12:22 EDT 2005 8:12pm up 2 days 7:06, 2 users, load average: 0.01, 0.06, 0.05 If you just try long enough and hard enough, you can always manage to boot yourself in the posterior. -- A. J. Liebling

--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-help@opensuse.org

El Viernes, 19 de Agosto de 2005 02:21, Buddy Lindsey escribió:

Well what would it take to get mad to be included?

MAD is in fact already being used. To add support for MP3 in kdemultimedia the package you install is "kdemultimedia3-mad". The question is why doesn't Suse include this package in the CD instead of having to install it through YOU. I guess it's because the MP3 format has some patents (I don't know how many), at least in the USA. So if we want Suse to include MP3 support, we need to fight software patents in USA and all around the world even if we don't live there. -- Víctor Fernández Martínez Gabinete de prensa de PoLinux [www.polinux.upv.es]. Usuario de Linux registrado #312284 en http://counter.li.org.

Yes thats it. Its available via update --- Buddy Lindsey wrote:

So basically the solution is to offer it in the updates? Is that what you are saying? I got lost reading it.

On 8/18/05, Víctor Fernández Martínez wrote:

...

El Viernes, 19 de Agosto de 2005 02:21, Buddy Lindsey escribió:

...

Well what would it take to get mad to be included?

MAD is in fact already being used. To add support for MP3 in kdemultimedia the package you install is "kdemultimedia3-mad". The question is why doesn't Suse include this package in the CD instead of having to install it through YOU. I guess it's because the MP3 format has some patents (I don't know how many), at least in the USA. So if we want Suse to include MP3 support, we need to fight software patents in USA and all around the world even if we don't live there.

-- Víctor Fernández Martínez Gabinete de prensa de PoLinux [www.polinux.upv.es]. Usuario de Linux registrado #312284 en http://counter.li.org.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

...

To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-help@opensuse.org

---------------------------------------------------------------------

To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-help@opensuse.org

____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs

Adrian Schroeter wrote:

I do want to excuse that Novell employees will not be able to take part much of this discussion for now. The reason is that we currently try to find out how we can solve this really important problem.

However, as usual when the law is involved, you better speak about nothing without your lawyer.

Well I'm sure Novell has its own lawyers whom they can consult on this question and obtain a definitive answer either way. But then again, there may be some grey areas in the law that Novell might want to avoid. As a friend on another forum said: "Novell wants to be squeaky clean". -- Shriramana Sharma http://samvit.org (o- Penguin #395953 //\ running on ancient Indian wisdom V_/_ and modern computing efficiency

I think the best course of action would be to get novell to support adding mp3 support out of the box. It is very annoying to not have it, but require an update to get it to work. The reason I say this is because I could only get xmms to actually work. no other mp3 players. IMO it should we need to have it and all other players work. easily.

On Thu, Aug 18, 2005 at 09:16:05PM -0500, Buddy Lindsey wrote:

I think the best course of action would be to get novell to support adding mp3 support out of the box. It is very annoying to not have it, but require an update to get it to work. The reason I say this is because I could only get xmms to actually work. no other mp3 players. IMO it should we need to have it and all other players work. easily.

The problem is not the license of "mad", its the probably patented algorithms inside (which automatically would void the LGPL/GPL anyway). However, Realplayer is included in the SUSE Linux products (for openSUSE snapshots it is on the ftp site). Its plugins can be understood in 10.0 by "banshee" (C# based media player) and "amarok-helix" (The new KDE media player). Someone should/could probably write a mpg123-helix commandline player too or xmms-helix plugins. Ciao, Marcus

On 2005-08-19 at 12:57:43 +0530, Shriramana Sharma wrote (shortened):

On 8/19/05, Marcus Meissner wrote:

...

The problem is not the license of "mad", its the probably patented algorithms inside (which automatically would void the LGPL/GPL anyway).

How can mad have a license that is "more open" than any one of its components?

Licenses != Patents Regards, Wolfgang Rosenauer -- SUSE - A Novell business -o) Tel: +49-(0)911-740 53 0 Maxfeldstr. 5 /\\ Fax: +49-(0)911-740 53 489 90409 Nuernberg, Germany _\_v

On 2005-08-19 at 13:40:07 +0530, Shriramana Sharma wrote (shortened):

On 8/19/05, Wolfgang Rosenauer wrote:

...

...

...

The problem is not the license of "mad", its the probably patented algorithms inside (which automatically would void the LGPL/GPL anyway).

How can mad have a license that is "more open" than any one of its components?

Licenses != Patents

Oh, right. But a patented technology needs to be licenced to be used/distributed, no?

if your write your own code and give it a license you might not know that the algorithm is patented. Or even if you know it you can license it as you like. Regards, Wolfgang Rosenauer -- SUSE - A Novell business -o) Tel: +49-(0)911-740 53 0 Maxfeldstr. 5 /\\ Fax: +49-(0)911-740 53 489 90409 Nuernberg, Germany _\_v

El Viernes, 19 de Agosto de 2005 00:18, Dan Gordon escribió:

On Thursday 18 August 2005 5:58 pm, Víctor Fernández Martínez wrote:

...

Who says MAD is not GPL?

Ok mad is gpl but most people are not aware of it. Most of the people you might talk to in North America only know about lame.

But lame is open source too, just take a look at its website: http://lame.sourceforge.net/ In the first paragraph it says it's LGPL.

This may be true and other distros like Mandrake (now Mandriva) have also stopped packaging anything to do with mp3.

I didn't knew. The last release I used (10.0) had support for it but it has been more than a year since it was out.

Exactly and that is why you wont find anything to do with mp3 in the main stream of any recent distro. But it is usually not to hard to have support for it if you really want it.

Yes, that's the point. I think a good idea would be to patch the different programs to make them show a warning telling the user that the system doesn't have support for MP3 when he tries to open one file in that format and the required codecs are not installed. The warning should also tell the user he may install the MP3 support using YOU. AFAIK, Fedora patched XMMS to show the first warning but didn't explain how to add support for MP3 files. Suse should supply this and with every player it officially supports. Else we'll find more and more people complaining in the forums and in different places for Suse not having MP3 support. I also assume if someone decides to make his own distro based on openSUSE (or perhaps a customization of it) and it's only going to be deployed in Europe or other countries MP3 is not patented, there will be no problem to add out-of-the-box support for it. -- Víctor Fernández Martínez Gabinete de prensa de PoLinux [www.polinux.upv.es]. Usuario de Linux registrado #312284 en http://counter.li.org.

El Viernes, 19 de Agosto de 2005 04:14, Shriramana Sharma escribió:

On 8/19/05, Víctor Fernández Martínez wrote:

...

I also assume if someone decides to make his own distro based on openSUSE (or perhaps a customization of it) and it's only going to be deployed in Europe or other countries MP3 is not patented, there will be no problem to add out-of-the-box support for it.

Well, you got me interested here. Just the past couple of days I was thinking of making a smaller download of SUSE 10 by removing GNOME (I never use it) and a lot of other packages - targeting the very very basic kind of home user who only want to use a computer to do wordprocessing and browse the net and maybe listen to a few songs. Another issue are the localization packs for OOo. We here in India will use hardly nothing beyond the English (and maybe Indian localized versions - the few that are there) of OOo.

So now the question is: how do I find out whether mp3 is patented in India?

AFAIK the indian government tried to change the law to accept software patents but finally they got a lot of ressistance and they didn't accomplish it. So there are no software patents in India and you can add support for mp3 if you make your mini-SUSE. BTW, a part from the way I mentioned in the "Merging the 4 Setup CDs into one DVD", you may remove *Gnome*.sel in suse/setup/descr inside the CD. Then edit "selections" in that directory and remove the lines containing anything related to Gnome. That way Gnome won't appear in YaST anymore. Now when you remove more packages remember to search for them in the different selection files and remove them from there. You may use KFind to do that selecting the proper path and typing the package name in the Contents tab. -- Víctor Fernández Martínez Gabinete de prensa de PoLinux [www.polinux.upv.es]. Usuario de Linux registrado #312284 en http://counter.li.org.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Shriramana Sharma wrote: |> AFAIK the indian government tried to change the law to accept software patents |> but finally they got a lot of ressistance and they didn't accomplish it. So |> there are no software patents in India and you can add support for mp3 if you |> make your mini-SUSE. | | That's good. But "no software patents" does not mean "intellectual | property not recognized", I hope. That would legalize unlicensed | copying of Windoze... "Intellectual property" does not mean a thing, that's a much hyped marketing term that does not reflect anything, legal-wise. There are just two things to differentiate: - - copyright (= licensing) - - patents Copyrights are quite clear and understood, and apply almost equally everywhere. Patents are a totally different thing, and there it very much depends on the country you live in. Unlicensed copying of Windows is against their EULA (End-User License Agreement), which means it's against their copyrights (their proprietary license, actually). Please use those terms with great care, as they're very often being confused and which results in a lot of wrong statements (especially over the whole software patent thing) ;-) - -- ~ -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ ~ /\\ ~ _\_v The more things change, the more they stay insane. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDBiehr3NMWliFcXcRAhpMAJ4jIiD+8KbxYd8yogmPbiCEUPXMywCfTSHp YAnIjSLq/Z/3wN1QJj6C08s= =VlJh -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----