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.
I guess I don't see where you're going with this then. I just built the "mad" plugin for gstreamer, added it to /usr/lib/gstreamer-<version> and ran gst-register. gstreamer now plays mp3's. Exactly what does Red Hat need to do? Looks like their current setup allows you to add mp3 support without modifying any packages that are a part of Fedora.
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.
freetype is available under the BSD license, so the problems keeping mp3 support out of Fedora and Red Hat Linux don't apply.
The GPL specifically prohibits distributing software that is patent encumbered. All of the common mp3 player packages for Linux are GPL licensed. That means that there's no way to legally distribute that software in locations where mp3 technology is patent encumbered.
