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:2005-11-05
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.
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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:Kudos to you guys for all this work.
And as for this -
Do you really think a distribution like Red Hat or Novell has nothing better to do than do all this ?
well, for their users they could hardly find anything better to do than this.
Byt he way, out of curiaosity: how much money does it cost? Clearly the sum is undisclosed, but could one give us some idea what is the order of magnitude? $100,000? Was it a one-time deal or annually paid sum?
Member since:Thanks for getting it done! We in userland appreciate it greatly! Does this mean I'll be able to rip, not just read? And will you work with Novell, RedHat, etc., to get it into the top distros? Hoping so....
IMO, the best solution for this situation is what you have done: satisfy Fraunhofer (sp?) legal requirements by contracting with them for royalties, but still being able to provide an open-source codec for the format. The RIAA isn't going to like this, since their DRM-ware on CDs won't prevent rips to MP3 on Linux boxes, but that only puts the enforcement of copyrights back to what it should be: legal action against violators, not restricted use by legal users. You have in effect swung the legal balance in that battle back in favor of "fair use" for legal users. No small feat, and not of small consequence.
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:
2005-07-27
>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...