RESEND(Wrong Thread): IMAGE/MP3 licensing issue.

Sam Kuper sam.kuper at uclmail.net
Wed Nov 12 14:55:35 CET 2008


2008/11/12 Rui Miguel Silva Seabra <rms at 1407.org>
>
> On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 01:23:19PM +0000, Thomas White wrote:
> > On Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:15:44 +0800
> > Ray Chao <ray_chao at openmoko.com> wrote:
> >
> > > We are sorry that currently we have to remove all the images on the
> > > download server of Openmoko. http://downloads.openmoko.org/release/
> >
> > Erk... are you able to give any more details about the exact reasons?
>
> He did:
>
> > Subject: RESEND(Wrong Thread): IMAGE/MP3 licensing issue.
> >
> (...)
> >
> > We will make another stable release as soon as possible.  At the mean
> > time, we could rebuild those old releases without mp2/mp3.  However,
> (...)
>
> I can give you the rest:
> http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html
>
> http://stopsoftwarepatents.eu/

I understand the MP3 patent issue reasonably well, but couldn't OM use
LAME?[1] Users could be asked to compile the software themselves
(providing it wasn't made terribly difficult), if that's an issue...
Or have I missed the point?

(Obviously, Vorbis and FLAC are preferable to MP3, but for those
people - and I'm sure there are lots of them - who have MP3-encoded
media, a decoder is still needed, even if only to transcode to a freer
format.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAME




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