On Thu, 2002-08-29 at 00:41, Bryan Whitehead wrote: > Why doesn't Mandrake, RedHat, and others simply pay $50,000 on behalf of > the XMMS team. Then they will have an unlimited license for decoding > .mp3's. Mandrake/Redhat/others simply distribute XMMS.... > > Or am I missing something?
Yes. 1), $50k is a non-trivial amount of money, but that's not the important point. 2), it would necessitate a license change, were this patent issue actually to apply. Mandrake's license makes it freely redistributable; once you have Mandrake you can perfectly legally give it to anyone else. This wouldn't be allowed under the terms of Thompson's patent license. XMMS would somehow then have to be not legally redistributable under Mandrake's license - effectively it'd have to be included with commercially licensed software on the for-sale edition only. This is one of the big problems with this issue - if you think about it it doesn't apply to Microsoft or Apple, since you can't legally redistribute WMP or iTunes. But cf Jason Greenwood's recent posting, this is all a non-issue anyway. -- adamw
