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..."

Comments

Welcome to the future!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora users are gonna party likes its 1999!

Re: Welcome to the future!

[KiloByte]

it took them 20 years to add mp3 support, how long do you think it takes to fix the init system which was taken in 5 years ago? Hint: do not hold your breath while waiting.

I don't expect systemd to be fixed, ever, but in 5 years you can expect the CADT team to invent a yet another init scheme, with even more regressions, and force everyone to transition to it.

Re: Welcome to the future!

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I don't expect systemd to be fixed, ever, but in 5 years you can expect the CADT team to invent a yet another init scheme, with even more regressions, and force everyone to transition to it.

Lets call it dmetsys; it'll use double-encypted log and config files with a proprietary unlock key that costs $75 per bootup.

All config directives will be in Sumerian, but the values will be written in Sicilian Arabic.

Documentation must be done solely in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Finally, any configuration mistake should trigger an automatic format of all attached hard drives.

Re: wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Why bother...

[NotInHere]

Indeed we do, but consider that reencoding files in vorbis and opus makes them subject to generational loss, and you'll still need an mp3 decoder for that. Plus, you'll lose the ability to share it with other people, because they won't be able to play back the file, or wonder what the ".opus" file extension is.

Its sad, but if you show this headline to random non technical people, and explained to them that fedora was an OS like windows or mac os, they will think that fedora couldn't play back audio files before.

Welcome to 1999

[geek]

This type of shit really holds Linux back from the mainstream

Re:Welcome to 1999

[fibonacci8]

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.

Re:Welcome to 1999

[caseih]

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.

Re:Why has it taken [all] this long?

[knorthern knight]

> 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.