> Hello all! > After some discussions of Lame's license and the use of Lame in commercial > applications I had some talk with the company I have contact to and they > changed their interface in order to include Lame as standalone program. This > should at least end teh discussion about GPL or not for this kind of use. > The other thing is that will now include Lame with their program on their > CDROM, including the complete source! > Next is the licensing problem. They can distribute Lame because they have a > licensing agreement with FhG. I am currently discussing with them the > posssibility to license Lame alone without having to buy their MP3 Player ;) > This way everyone could use Lame legally though it is still ridiculous to > license a free project :( > Comments welcome... > CU > nils There is one thing you may not have understood : you don't buy a license and then do whatever you want with the encoder. The company will have to pay from 25$ to 2.5$ to Fraunhofer(with a minimum of 15000$ a year) for each version of Lame that will be used(not sold). Even if you give away Lame, you have to pay for EACH encoder that is used by someone else. If the company accept to pay for encoder versions of Lame that it has not sold but that we have given,it will not survive it. The use of Lame will be legal for each user who will have buy it from your company and thus indirectly registered to Fhg: Fhg perceives a toll on each encoder legally possessed by someone. If you decide to give it away free, that's your problem(or the company's one) but you have to pay for each encoder given. Lame won't be legal except for those who buy it from your company. The only way to have Lame legal and free for all is that the patent are declared invalid, or that you gave it away in a country where these patents are not legal.I read that Fhg had patents in USA and Germany, but what about the other countries? Lionel -- MP3 ENCODER mailing list ( http://geek.rcc.se/mp3encoder/ )
