On Sat, Oct 05, 2002 at 04:48:26PM -0400, Ken Mink spoke thusly: > P.S. Someone at RedHat needs to be bitch slapped for removing mp3 > support from xmms on rh8. After installing a new version of the OS, I > wasn't expecting a lack of mp3 support to be the reason my mp3s wouldn't > play. That one took a while to diagnose.
Then take it up with the lawyers. There are PATENT ISSUES with mp3 decoder inclusion. On distros prior to 8.0, the owner of said patent didn't have an issue, and there's no clear statement that a commercially released GNU/Linux Distro won't be forced to pay $.75 per decoder shipped. I thought there was enough warning in (a) the betas, (b) the readmes, and (c) the OSS newsmedia, which covered these issues pretty heavily at the time. Me? I'm converting all my stuff to ogg, and that includes re-ripping all my CDs. Ogg is free, and will continue to be free. Which is a good thing. Oh, and I'm not speaking for my employer. Yeah, I thought it was a pain at first too. but in looking at the larger issue, I think they did the right thing. And anyway, after hearing an ogg side by side with an mp3 of the same track, ripped from the same cd on the same computer, well, I'll take ogg. *grin* -- ---------------------------------- -- Kevin Sonney -- -- ICQ: 4855069 AIM: ksonney -- ---------------------------------- 320C 0336 3BC4 13EC 4AEC 6AF2 525F CED7 7BB6 12C9 Windows and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture -- Neal Stephenson
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