On Wed, 2002-11-27 at 23:36, Michael Scherer wrote: > > Mandrake currently ships several things that walk the fine line of > > licensing. Perfect example of this is the mp3 decoders included in the > > distribution. It is unclear if Mandrake should have to pay royalties on > > every CD it ships (though I think free downloads it is clear that they > > would not). Yet, mp3 decoders are shipped in main. > It may seems unclear, but you look at > http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html, you see you must pay 0.75 $ per > unit, for a decoder. > The links was given by the website of the Fraunhofer institute. > > You can see they have patents in a lot of country, including Germany, > Danemark, USA and France. > > Of course, Mandrake should not pay, as they are not the developer, but, i > don't think that the authors of zinf, and xmms have paid... > If these software are illegal, is it safe to keep them in main ? > > Mick
Close this one right now. It was debated at tedious length a month or so ago. The issue was entirely resolved by negotiation between Thomson and Mandrakesoft. It's NOT AN ISSUE anymore, please don't pollute the list with more discussion on it. -- adamw
