On Sunday 24 December 2006 15:00, Randall R Schulz wrote:
If you do respect the patent, then you should stick to using commercial MP3 hardware and software.
Not necessary. For home/non-commercial use, are free to use mp3. From the mp3 licensing site: Quote: However, no license is needed for private, non-commercial activities (e.g., home-entertainment, receiving broadcasts and creating a personal music library), not generating revenue or other consideration of any kind or for entities with associated annual gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00. http://www.mp3licensing.com/help/index.html Thomson/Fraunhofer have declined to press any actions against free software projects, which is why such things as lame, sox, grip and 6 or 7 others exist. Given that, I suspect distros that are released totally for free could arguably include mp3 support out of the box, er, download, by simply supplying it from a non-oss media/repo, so as to avoid any problems with the GPL. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen