Re: early review of RH 9 (Shrike)

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Re: early review of RH 9 (Shrike)



On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Elton Woo wrote:

>> Thanks for the link to the article. It sounds like the coverage was
>> fairly in-line with my experiences with this beta.
>>
>> The mozilla phone calls make me wonder, for those that plan on upgrading
>> only. I guess since it doesn't work well. They might be better off with
>> the 1.3 or later browser versions.
>>
>> Jim
>
>I must say that I'm a rather disappointed the the status quo WRT MP3
>support in Red Hat 9 remains the same. Considering that both Mandrake
>and SUSe are releasing their next versions with MP3 support in them...
>(... unless I'm seriously mistaken about this!).

Since the legal issues that resulted in the removal of MP3 
support from Red Hat Linux 8.0 still exist, you can more or less 
expect that there will be no MP3 support in Red Hat Linux until 
there are no legal issues present which prevent Red Hat from 
shipping MP3 support.

The GPL license does not permit software to contain elements
which are covered by patents unless the patent owner has granted
in writing, unrestricted rights to use the patented elements in
the GPL licensed software without restrictions.  For details of
the exact wording, consult the GPL license and it should be
clear.  If it is still not clear, then consult a patent
attourney.

In some parts of the world, the MP3 patents may not be valid, and 
in those areas it may or may not satisfy the GPL requirements in 
those specific countries.  It is also possible that some other 
Linux vendors simply are ignoring the GPL/patent clause and 
taking their chances.  Anyone is free to take chances of course.

In short, don't expect to see MP3 support in Red Hat Linux any 
time soon as the reasons that resulted in its removal still 
exist.


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat



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