Fedora's way forward

[David Cantrell]

Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> sean <seanlkml at 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