Tell me where on this page:
http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html
...you find where it says "royalty-free distribution of free decoders."
If you find that magic phrase, let me know and we'll drop mp3 support into Fedora Core tomorrow. :)
Well Greg, if we had that magic key, we would already have mp3 support in SUSE Linux OSS ;) Nevertheless, the retail version supports mp3 playback out-of-the-box(TM).
Chris, those royalties are for licensors of their patents. It is my understanding that they don't apply to MP3 *decoders*, so you could distribute one without licensing their patents. The list of patents is available in http://www.mp3licensing.com/patents/index.html Just because they charge a per-decoder fee doesn't change things. They could, for example, charge a third fee based on, hmm, the number of radios sond by your corporation. That would not, by any means, imply that radio makers now have to license their patents. I believe the case with decoders is the same. Unless Novell also wants to distribute MP3 *encoders*, it has no need to license these patents. So you don't need no "magic key", just to review their patents and notice the extent to which they apply to MP3 *decoders* (which, I believe, is none). Thanks. Alejo. http://azul.freaks-unidos.net/ ---=( Comunidad de Usuarios de Software Libre en Colombia )=--- ---=( http://bachue.com/colibri )=--=( colibri@bachue.com )=---