patents
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings.co.za
Fri Mar 31 23:14:25 UTC 2006
On Friday 31 March 2006 22:41, mrwolff wrote:
> 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.
Again, possibly a good idea, but consider this:
How many software patents are out there, and what kind of precedent
would that set?
The last thing that IBM wants is to suddenly have the community look
to them to buy out all 50,000 patents that could be useable in Linux
The last thing WE want is to have IBM OWN all those patents.
--
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five
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