Eric S. Raymond wrote:
sean <seanlkml(a)sympatico.ca>:
> Well, Fraunhofer has this page:
>
>
http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm/licensing/index.html
>
> Which links to :
>
>
http://www.mp3licensing.com/
>
> Which definitely shows royalty fees for decoders.
It does. I stand corrected.
The page says $50K one time flat fee for a decoder. Is there any good
reason Red Hat shouldn't simply buy that license for some outfit with
a track record, like the lame developers? MP3 problem solved,
relatively cheaply (e.g., less than half the annual cost ofjust one
additional full-time coder).
Yes, I know feeding patent parasites is unpleasant. But we come back to
the central question here: do we want ideological purity at the expense of
victory, or do we want actual victory so that *we* get to effectively set
the terms of software development in the future?
I know which side of that question *I* come down on...
Ease up on the asterisks...
IANAL, but I see the one time royalty fee as something that wouldn't
work for a project like lame or any other MP3 software project. The fee
isn't even stated, they just give a range of $50K to $60K USD. And it's
listed for PC software applications. What does that mean? Use their
software/library/sdk? Could the project continue to release MP3
decoding and encoding code? Does it mean link in an object file that
Fraunhoffer provides? What happens if lame is incorporated in to a
Fedora-derived distribution that then runs on the iPod?
Dangerous grounds.
--
David Cantrell
Red Hat / Westford, MA