Re: [opensuse] Goodbye to suse

On Sunday 24 December 2006 14:05, Michael S. Dunsavage wrote:
On Sun, 2006-12-24 at 14:35 -0500, James Knott wrote:
Michael S. Dunsavage wrote:
On Sun, 2006-12-24 at 10:49 -0800, Jay Smith wrote:
As for your music, it's the same problem with Ubuntu. In Dapper and
Edgy, you
have to download extra xine codecs off of their multiverse repository.
You can't
just get mp3 support out of the box. I think there is something larger
than
Microsoft and Novell going on with these formats and patents. I don't
think it's
rational to get mad at Novell over our misfortunes. It's just a Linux
thing, not
a Novell thing.

I could be wrong, but I thought this had to do with copyright
infringement of unlicensed music?

Not all MP3's involve copyright infringement. There are plenty of legal
ones to play. Also as was previously ruled in a court (Betamax case?),
as long as there is legitimate use for a device, it cannot be banned
just because someone might use it illegally.

I understand that. However, I was under the impression that's why mp3's
don't play out-of-box. Even though it's no big deal, I just had to
update xine and amarok played no problem.

It isn't a copyright issue at all, but rather a patent one. Some idiot seems
to think you can patent algorithms and therefore some German Company -
Frauenhofer, I think - has a patent on the process to decode MPEG Layer 3
files. IIRC, the patent expires in about four years.

A ways back, some good samaritan came out with LAME - Lame Ain't an MP3
Encoder - to decode MP3 files using a different process than Frauenhofer.
Unfortunately, there's some question in backwards countries such as the USSA
whereby the decoding algorithm is under the same patend as Frauenhofer's.

Hence, Novell doesn't want to get into any legal trouble.

That's the reason to advocate OGG over MP3 whenever possible.



--
kai
www.perfectreign.com || www.4thedadz.com

a turn signal is a statement, not a request
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