George Farris wrote: > Every time someone complains about the lack of mp3 support it irks me. > What you're saying here is ignore the mp3 license but uphold the GPL. > Think about it. If we want people to respect the GPL then we must respect > other licenses. This is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. The license preventing inclusion of MP3 software in a Free Software operating system such as GNU/Linux is a patent license. Many believe that patents covering algorithms used in computer software (more succinctly known as "software patents") should not be honored. There are many valid points to defend this argument. Richard Stallman succinctly and thoroughly covers them in his patent talk which you can read or listen to at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ in the "speeches" area. By comparison, the GNU GPL is a copyright license. Copyright is a good basis on which to build computer software because it allows anyone who is willing to put the work into reinventing the program to license their work according to their wishes. For quite some time software patents did not exist and all we had was copyright. If we lived in a world without software patents, with only copyrights covering computer software, we could have the MP3 software already out there and get on with the task of either improving it or using something better to replace it. I don't think software patents should exist but I honor them with regard to MP3. I do this by encouraging the widespread use of Ogg Vorbis instead. Vorbis, in my opinion, offers superior encoding to MP3 at comparable file sizes (or Vorbis offers comparable quality at smaller file sizes than MP3, if you prefer to compare the other way). Vorbis is patent-free and part of an exciting set of codecs that I hope will someday become the de facto standard for Internet audio-video distribution on computers.
