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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..."
You've been around Slashdot since nearly the beginning so you should know this is clearly untrue. MP3 support in Linux back in the early 2000s wouldn't have made a bit of difference to overall Linux adoption. In fact many distros ignored the IP issues and simply included the codec without paying for a license. It would be nice to have a clear explanation of why they feel it's okay to ship an implementation of this patented algorithm now vs a few years ago. This is of course ignoring the fact that there should never have been a software patent on something like mp3 playback in the first place.
Linux has always been held back by the same things its always been held back by. It's an OS by geeks for geeks with a learning curve, bickering developers, petty egos, and contradictory goals. And more importantly there's the Windows/Office hegemony which still exists to this day, though it's weakening somewhat with MS's move to put Office in the cloud and sell subscriptions. Unlike Linux distributions and desktop environment developers, MS has always understood who their customer was. At least they used to.