ARTICLE - ESR gives up on Fedora

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

>   50,000$ one time up front fee, and they can solve the issue of an
> Open Source MP3 player.  For everyone.
> 
It was inadvertent that my news article about the $1.5 billion dollar
settlement on MP3 technology crossed your email about mp3 licensing, but
I did want to point out that I do not think that buying a license for a
"freely distributable mp3 library" would be as inexpensive as $50,000.
I will bet that as you tried to pursue that path you would find that
those figures on that chart were "examples", and that the price for
doing what you are talking about would be much higher, if available at
all.  After all, if it was that easy (and cheap), probably someone would
have done it by now.

I note from the article about the suit that Microsoft claims to have
paid $16,000,000. for their license.  Still cheap for them, but then
again they track their licenses, whereas Free Software is not tracked.

I will also point out that even in the chart the paid-up licenses are
only for players (decoders).  Encoding is both much more expensive and
per-unit only.

We will see how much the MP3 license really costs Microsoft, but as one
of the people commenting on the article said, no matter how much they
have to pay for the patent rights, and who, it is still worse when the
patent holder gets an injunction against them shipping.

Regards,

maddog