The Fluendo people have fully licensed the mp3 audio codec with redistribution rights in place, meaning that future versions of Fedora or Ubuntu will be able to support mp3 out of the box. "In order to improve the GNU/Linux and Unix multimedia experience Fluendo announced today the immediate availability of their MP3 plug-in for the GStreamer multimedia framework. The MP3 decoder is available free of charge both for individual end users and GNU/Linux and Unix distribution makers. In addition to making their licensed binary plug-in available to the public Fluendo also released the source code to this MP3 plug-in under the very permissive MIT license allowing all kind of developers and companies access to it."
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Member since:2005-07-27
>What I don't quite understand is - how is all this possible? What resources does Fluendo have that Redhat, Canonical or Novell don't, that they can provide MP3 support for free for everyone?
I second that, if it was "this easy", why didn't the big players do it? Surely, they have the money...
Member since:2005-11-05
Fluendo is the company that writes gstreamer, what part of that do you not understand? When it comes to multimedia and Linux, Fluendo knows it. They just hired a genius programmer (Edward hervey, author of pitivi) and he's been hacking away on python bindings for gstreamer + some other very cool projects.
Fluendo is doing this because gstreamer is their responsibility. Any newbie will attest that no mp3 support really sucks so they are filling this hole for the community. Why are you flaming a company that wants to help everyone out by giving you licensed codecs for free?
Take off your tinfoil hats, the black helecoptors aren't after you anymore.
Member since:Who said this was easy ?
a) we spent hours and hours discussing what our options are to make this possible
b) we spent even more hours coming up with a plan that gives every one involved the best deal (normal users, distributors, us), and still satisfy our upstream obligations
c) we paid a bunch of money to get the license
d) we spent a lot of days actually molding the reference code into a maintainable project with readable and reasonably speedy code
e) we spent a lot of days integrating IPP into the build
Do you really think a distribution like Red Hat or Novell has nothing better to do than do all this ? 
Member since:Well, I can just imagine the business model.
The licence company (who it is, i can't remember) realize that they can't beat OSS with their OGG with the current model of licence. Even so which is far more important, the WMA is also catching up, so they have to do someting without losing their face.
Also, to cooperate with Fluendo make more sence than to have an agreeemnet with Red Hat or Sun etc.
As a user, this is perfect. whit the next release of my distribution i can play mp3 out of the box.
But still, I will not be able to listen to my favorite radio station who use the WMA format without abandon gstreamer.
Member since:I suspect it's just that it wasn't a worthwhile investment for them to do so.
Fluendo specializes in streaming multimedia, I believe, so to be able to support MP3 is a big win for them. IBM and Redhat are targeting the server market, where MP3 playing ability isn't exactly a priority (a "HA-HA! My server plays MP3s better than your server!" "who cares?" sort of situation)
Novell is targetting the business desktop, which is less multimedia oriented than just about anything, so it's not exactly an amazing investment for them.
As for Canonical? I don't know. Maybe their resources are already streched by providing Ubuntu for free? Maybe Mark Shuttleworth decided it would be better to leave MP3 playing unsupported and just push for more adoption of free standards as a philosophical stance?
Member since:
2005-07-06
Actually, this is entirely a good thing - as I understand it, redistribution rights means that they will cover any expenses for the patents so that anyone can redistribute it.
It doesn't mean it isn't open source, it's MIT licensed.
What I don't quite understand is - how is all this possible? What resources does Fluendo have that Redhat, Canonical or Novell don't, that they can provide MP3 support for free for everyone?