Novell is a business, yes. Debian is not a business: yes. Redhat is a business: yes
I consider all these irrelevant. Novell and Redhat shouldn't be compared with Debian but rather with Canonical/Progeny. Debian could be compared with SuSE Linux OSS or Fedora. Some are distributions, other are businesses. I don't see anything separating the situation of Debian and Canonical/Progeny from the situation of SuSE Linux OSS and Novell (or Fedora and Redhat). Thus, I consider these facts irrelevant.
Debian has MP3: irrelevant Fedora doesn't have MP3: irrelevant.
The only reason I consider this slightly relevant is that Debian people tend to be *extremely* careful in not violating the law. Some would say paranoid. They even have a list devoted explicitly to this (and, as you can see in http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/09/threads.html , it has quite a bit of traffic; in this month it has distributed more than half as many messages as this list!). Yet they haven't found any reasons to remove the MP3 decoders from their distribution.
Alejandro, what you are saying is against common understanding of MP3 licensing, can you please find some supporting documents or discussion elsewhere, and not just a link to the large number of patents controlled by Thomson. Until Alejandro has done that, move along, there is nothing to see here......
Well, for the discussion you could browse their archives. A good starting point, while not the only one, could be: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/05/msg00226.html I would consider the “common understanding” rather subjective. I would, instead, be inclined to think that MP3 decoders should be included unless anyone can find a patent that can apply to a decoder. Alejo. http://azul.freaks-unidos.net/ ---=( Comunidad de Usuarios de Software Libre en Colombia )=--- ---=( http://bachue.com/colibri )=--=( colibri@bachue.com )=---