Stephen: I have a question for you about SongBird. Note that we cannot ship the GStreamer MP3 decoder plugin with Solaris (even though Sun has license with MPEG to distribute this decoder). The problem isn't with MPEG, it is with the GPL license.
Many programs which use GStreamer are under the GPL license, and the GPL license does not allow you to link with any code that contains license restrictions (such as patents that require you to pay fees to use them). Question #1 in the GStreamer Legal FAQ explains this issue a bit better than I can: http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/faq/html/chapter-legal.html Note that totem has the following GPL exception which allows people to link in GStreamer plugins which contain IP. So totem does not have this issue: http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/totem/trunk/license_change?revision=4301&view=markup However, rhythmbox and sound-juicer are under the GPL and do not have such a GPL exception. If SongBird has a better license which allows you to link in GStreamer plugins (such as the MP3 plugin), then perhaps it might make sense for us to move away from rhythmbox and move towards distributing SongBird? Note this is only an issue for *distributing* code. There is no GPL issue for end-users to, for example, download GStreamer plugins that require paying licensing fees and add them to GStreamer. These plugins just can't be distributed with the GPL programs. Or does SongBird have the same issue? I hope not. I am not sure we want to integrate more programs into Solaris that have such licensing issues. But I am guessing that the Mozilla folks are smarter about this sort of thing, since Firefox seems to allow people to link in plugins which allow playing of media files (e.g. mp3 files). Thoughts? Brian
