patents

[mrwolff]

Alan McKinnon wrote:

>On Friday 31 March 2006 05:00, Chanchao wrote:
>
>  
>
>>I'm only asking a similar level of
>>support in Ubuntu: Having the (a) included media player be able to
>>play mp3.
>>    
>>
>
>Reasonable thing to ask for, the way to do it is this:
>
>Get a letter from the mp3 patent holder which gives a permanent 
>irrevocable right to anyone to implement the mp3 standard without 
>payment of a license fee or signing of a contract.
>
>The ONLY reason Ubuntu doesn't have default mp3 support is because 
>no-one has that letter yet. We can bitch and moan all we want but the 
>truth is that we don't include it because in many places there is a 
>valid legal law that says we can't do it.
>
>  
>
The one thing I never got about this stuff is why one of the large 
corporations, for example IBM, doesn't just throw down a very large one 
time sum of money to buy the rights to whatever they need to make it 
free.  Especially since it is in the best interest of those companies to 
promote and spread Linux.  If the cost is too great, what about a 
partnership with a few other companies who extensively use Linux like 
Novell, etc?  You might say the cost of doing that is too great, but I 
haven't even heard of any of the corporations trying.  The same I think 
could be done with other formats.