On Sun, 2005-02-20 at 13:09 -0500, Michael Jennings wrote: > On Saturday, 19 February 2005, at 17:36:34 (-0500), > seth vidal wrote: > > > mp3 support, for another. > > MP3 decoders are okay. It's the *en*coders that are restricted. As > long as we don't sell anything, we can distribute MP3 decoders for > free all we want. > > http://www.newsforge.com/business/02/08/29/1633205.shtml?tid=17 > > Michael > I don't think that Tomson Electronics terms are compatible with the GPL because of the restrictions. I believe LAME (or any other MP3 CODEC under the GPL) is, in the USA and a few other countries, not legally GPLed because of the patent issues. Because no commercial disto can include it legally for encoding or decoding. Tomson/Fraunhofer may or may not have changed their minds in the past. They certainly could in the future if the wanted to. External repositories could certainly if they wanted to make it easy enough to add themselves to CentOS by installing a RPM. [rant] Frankly putting a note in the FAQ about the Patent/Copyright issues might be a little bit of encouragement for people that are not currently under such restrictions as USA, Australia (I believe), England, Japan and a few others I can't remember now to keep on their toes and block passage of such legislation. If enough countries don't follow the USA's restrictions maybe us in the USA have a chance to overturn the restrictions we currently are under so that US companies can compete with the more rational world. [/rant] Paul