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Red Hat Announces Fedora Will Support MP3 Playback (fedoraproject.org)
Long-time Slashdot reader jrincayc shares news from Red Hat's Fedora Engineering Manager, Tom Callaway. On the Fedora-legal mailing list, Callaway announced:
Red Hat has determined that it is now acceptable for Fedora to include MP3 decoding functionality (not specific to any implementation, or binding by any unseen agreement). Encoding functionality is not permitted at this time.
And the same day Christian Schaller announced on the Gnome blog that mp3 playback would be supported in Fedora Workstation 25. You should be able to download the mp3 plugin on Day 1 through GNOME Software or through the missing codec installer in various GStreamer applications. For Fedora Workstation 26 I would not be surprised if we decide to ship it on the install media.
He added, "I know this has been a big wishlist item for a long time for a lot of people..."
And the same day Christian Schaller announced on the Gnome blog that mp3 playback would be supported in Fedora Workstation 25. You should be able to download the mp3 plugin on Day 1 through GNOME Software or through the missing codec installer in various GStreamer applications. For Fedora Workstation 26 I would not be surprised if we decide to ship it on the install media.
He added, "I know this has been a big wishlist item for a long time for a lot of people..."
No it doesn't. There was a patent on mp3 decoding and still one on encoding. Red hat not wanting to be sued by Fraunhofer opted out of paying royalties. Everyone using mpg123, xmms, etc have wilfully ignored this law because really how would a university sue every user? They don't they sue distributors. That is why Be Inc , Microsoft, apple, Ubuntu etc all pay royalties.
The patents have expired, now it can be included without violating the law
Software Patents? Yes we know. According to OSNews the last of the patents expires in April of 2017. So the base install of the next version of Fedora should be safe to include software for encoding and decoding of MP3 by then.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
> So if the community wouldn't pay to license in the past, I take it they are willing now?
Nope. It's just that the mp3-decoding patents have expired, so there is no need for a licence now. https://www.tunequest.org/a-bi...
Some patents for mp3-encoding are still in effect, but they expire by the end of 2017. Expect Redhat to ship mp3-encoders then.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user