Actually it's 'grey' in Australia. The government and law makers are totally confused down here... On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 20:11:21 -0600, Paul <subsolar at subsolar.org> wrote: > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at caosity.org > http://lists.caosity.org/mailman/listinfo/centos >