Skip to main content

Why MP3 is not included in Fedora?

These press releases speak themselves:


Read the excellent post on Fedora was right about MP3!.

Comments

Anonymous said…
This just shows how software patents can hurt. It doesn't reflect upon Fedora's mp3 decision. It looks like Microsoft (and Dell, Gateway) are getting sued for technology they licensed from Fraunhofer (the mp3 inventors). In the field of signal (and specifically audio) coding, Bell Labs are like IBM. They have a related patent on everything important, it's just whether they want to sue you or not. Even the Ogg guys, and by extension Fedora, are not out of their reach.
Unknown said…
> Other than non-being open source

It's not open-source that's the issue. There's plenty of oss/gpl mp3 code (e.g. libmad, lame).

mp3 is nonfree due to patents, period.
post #1: true. It further confirms that software patents causes mess which won't be for Bell Labs interests to get their methos being reverse-engineering.

Rex: Thanks for pointing that out. I updated the blog to reflect it.
They have a related patent on everything important, it's just whether they want to sue you or not. Even the Ogg guys, and by extension Fedora, are not out of their reach.

As someone said before: show the infringing codes and we will remove them.

Popular posts from this blog

gnome-shell useless with nouveau driver

Running rawhide 20090924 from desktop system , I test gnome-shell to explore its features (seems Activities name is inspired from Sugar interface . Very disappointing because the shell needs hardware acceleration i.e 3D support. Even Sugar interface did a much better job despite its simple look. Picture speaks itself.

No network on Fedora 9 x86_64 follow up

Following my post related to NetworkManager . I have found out about the workaround. If you have x86_64 system with 4GB support enabled, you should disable it in order to make NetworkManager work. I am not sure if that bug affects other distributions so, possibly the bug may be related to the x86_64 kernel. Let see if my theory can be verified.

Joga.com extension problem with Firefox on Fedora

There is an extension from joga.com that provide more details about world cup football (soccer in North America) result. Unfortunately, it won't install on Fedora version of Firefox even though it is 1.5.x.y. It looks like a bug from joga,com. I submitted a bug report so hopefully joga.com will fix it. Joga football extension ---- joga.com fournit une extension de resultat de la coup du monde de football. Malheureusemnt, cette extension ne fonctionne pas sur la version Fedora de Firefox. J'ai envoyé un courriel à joga.com concernant le problème. Pourvu que le bogue soit fix&eacute.