I wonder if anyone can find the Debian discussion/official decision (do they publish official decisions on things like this?) on this.
I am generally glad to defer tough questions to outside organizations who we can respect, because it saves us from having to argue about it.
Of course, Debian says that the GNU FDL is non-free, so obviously we can't defer to them on everything. However, they are still a respectable voice.
--Jimbo
Delirium wrote:
Timwi wrote:
Delirium wrote:
Debian's legal team is pretty conservative (read: paranoid) on these matters, and Debian currently includes mp3-playback software in the main distribution (package 'xmms', among others). Mp3-encoding software is not part of Debian due to patent issues, but playback software is, so it seems their legal team has determined there aren't any problems with playback.
How recent is the distribution you're referring to? As evidenced by http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/openletter.html, the MP3 decoding patent has only been enforced for less than two years now.
It's quite recent: about 10 minutes old. I just updated my system, and the various MP3 playback things are all of course still in the official repository. Debian pulls things pretty aggressively when legal troubles arise, and there's been a lot of discussion about MP3 but nothing's been pulled. I didn't follow the discussion, but there was quite a bit two years ago when that Vorbis open letter came out, and I assume by the lack of action over such a lengthy period of time that the discussion's ended in favor of "no legal problems with MP3 playback".
-Mark
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