What are consequences of "merger necessitates removal of ...

[Warren Togami]

On Mon, 2003-09-22 at 08:48, Maynard Kuona wrote:
> I sometimes wish Redhat would just buy the license. It is becoming very
> inconvenient for us. With fedora now merged with Redhat, we now have to
> get these somewhere else. Can these not be hosted outside US, as a
> temporary measure until the issue is resolved, because it needs to be. I
> am no longer encoding my cds into mp3, but I have so many mp3's, it is a
> hassle to to this nicely with Redhat. How much does the license cost. Is
> it not $50,000 for the perpetual license.

Licensing is impossible due to the nature of the GPL.  You cannot have a
situation where RH or Fedora can distribute the MP3 player, but but
anyone that copied the distribution and distributed it elsewhere
cannot.  The GPL stipulates that there cannot be any additional
restrictions on distribution, so anything that requires royalties is
impossible to be compatible with the GPL.

Warren