Re: [Advocate Play Ogg] Correction to the PlayOgg page

[Gabriele 'LightKnight' Stilli]

sabato 17 novembre 2007, alle 23:06, Yuhong Bao scrive:

> Under "Choose Free Software!" it should be:
> 
> "Also, the MP3 patents makes it impossible to use free software to play
> MP3s, because it would be impossible to pay the royalties required.
> That is espicially important if you are switching to GNU/Linux. There
> is one player for MP3s that are free software, except that it have a
> patent license that is more restrictive. The GPL prevents that, but
> that player is licensed under another free software license. "

I'm not entirely sure that this is so. VLC, Audacious, MPlayer, mpg321,
XMMS, are free software players (most of them licensed under "GPLv2 or
later") that can reproduce MP3s (and for sure there are many others). I
don't know how they stand patent-wise and if they actually did pay the
requested royalties. Can anyone enlighten me on the matter?

For the "GPL prevents that" part, this may only be true for the GPLv3,
since GPLv2 doesn't talk about patents at all. Here, too, I would like
some clarifications about this.

What specific free software player are you talking about?

Thank you. Cheers, happy Xmas everybody and long live Ogg! :-)
Gabriele :-)

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