On Fri, 28 Mar 2003, Graydon wrote: >> Good point. Considering that Mandrake was supposed to "go under" >> by way of bankruptcy, and have now released a full new version >> with mp3 support included. Does this mean that nothwithstanding, >> they (Mandrake) have deeper pockets than Red Hat? > >Gods, no. > >Red Hat *specifically decided* not to license MP3, because they're being >GPL purists.
Bzzzt. Wrong. Red Hat could license MP3 rights, but Red Hat could not ship any GPL software after obtaining those MP3 rights because the GPL *clearly* states that patents are incompatible with the license unless the patent owner grants unrestricted redistribution rights. Paying for a patent does not give you unrestricted redistribution rights, and as such paying for the patent would resolve only the "license to use the patent" issue. It would not resolve the issue of the patent, and the license of the patent that would be granted if it was paid for - both being incompatible with the GPL license. If there were a BSD or MIT licensed MP3 decoder, and it was absolutely not derived in any way from GPL'd code, then Red Hat could theoretically license the patent and use it with the BSD licensed code. That is just theoretical of course. People repeatedly misunderstand the MP3 issues. There are 2 main issues. 1) MP3 technology is patented, and requires a license of some sort to be granted on paper. This means that "we haven't sued anyone yet" and "we have a note on our website" are not valid legal patent license grants. A written signed contract is considered valid, wether it is granted for free, or wether someone has paid a fee to obtain such a license. 2) All open source MP3 software is GPL licensed currently (at least to my knowledge), and that means that wether you pay for the patent licensing or not, the patent still violates the GPL licensed MP3 decoder software no matter how you slice it. Unless *BOTH* of those issues can be resolved, then there is a continuing problem that will prevent MP3 support from being included in Red Hat Linux. Please write this down, as people seem to ignore one of the above 2 issues all of the time. It is possible that the patent holder has "a price" at which they would basically sell all rights of their patent to another party. The $50000 is unlikely that price point. What they would sell their patent outright for, or what pricetag they would put on a license that would allow legal GPL redistribution without breaking the terms of the GPL license _or_ the patent license is only known to them (if they'd even consider that). Now can we put this dead horse to rest, or is it going to recur every 6 months until the end of time? Nevermind, I think I know the answer. -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat -- Phoebe-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/phoebe-list
