Helix Banshee I find very useful... I believe it uses Real's license since RealPlayer is doing the hard work of decoding. I think it might be easier to get to partner wtih companies that already have licenses, and pay royalties. for BSD-licensed software, you can still provide open source software and link to the (necessarily, specially in the US) proprietary codecs and encryption stuff. I think Linspire does this... It might not make sense for Novell to do this, but members of the community can create a deriv of OpenSUSE that's basically a "home edition" type distro that takes the opensuse base and adds all the cool stuff legally :) (like linspire is to debian/ubuntu) On 5/5/07, Benji Weber <b.weber@warwick.ac.uk> wrote:
On 5/5/07, Alberto Passalacqua <alberto.passalacqua@tin.it> wrote:
It's very expensive. I don't remember the price of the licence, but there was a discussion on the IRC channel some time ago and I remember it was high.
See http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/ but pricing is not the only problem, If the MP3 de/encoding software is GPLed then there are problems with section 7 of the GPL if they obtain a licence for only their distributees and not a blanket licence for everyone to use mp3 encoding/decoding.
" For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."
So either they'd have to distribute mp3 support via non-gpl plugins (eg helix in the past, which causes problems in itself linking to it from gpled programmes like amarok) or just not distribute it at all.
Ubuntu of course ignore all these legalities.
_ Benjamin Weber --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org