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:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-11-05
Read the laws, the Fraunhoefer Institute still holds the patents on the mp3 codec and would require each distribution that wants to add out of the box mp3 support to license it. I'm sure many of the purists will cry foul *cough* Debian *cough*.
While very important, I somehow doubt this will mean distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE will include out of the box mp3 support as they are made of completely free software. Redhat doesn't even include ntfs support as ntfs is patented by MS. Hopefully they will just make it easier to install the plugins.
Example: You try to play an mp3 in rhythmbox and it says, "Mp3 support is not currently enabled, would you like to install it?" You click yes and (insert favorite package manager) it's downloaded and installed from somewhere online from Fluendo. That is the best case scenario that we need to work towards.
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Read carefully, they are not bashing Fluendo, they are criticizing Novell, Red Hat and Canonical for stripping MP3 from their distros and annoying their users the hell out. Now thanks to Fluendo we can get MP3 support out of the box again.