On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 06:29, Gordon Messmer wrote: > Maynard Kuona wrote: > > I think it would be nice if > > Redhat compiled gstreamer and gstreamer-plugins with mp3 support, and > > then removed the mp3 packages, usually libmad, gstreamer-mad from the > > distribution. > > Can't happen. They'd end up distributing mp3 software in the src.rpm, > which is not allowed by the GPL. > > They don't have to. They just compile it ready to take mp3 decoding software. The decoding bits, libmad and gstreamer-mad, are not made dependencies. gstreamer-plugins and gstreamer will not depend on libmad. Only gstreamer-mad will depend on libmad, which is the mp3 decoding software. I am sure this would be possible and avoid the patent issue. Its quite similar to what happens to freetype too. They do not enable native hinting, even though the capability is in the sources. The end user would need to actually recompile after changing some option in the sources. I am asking for them to do something similar.
