Slashdot.org is reporting some sad news. Multimedia giants Thompson and Fraunhofer who own the licenses of the MP3 format have changed the the licensing terms.
Even freeware software is now obliged to pay 0.75$ per distributed application. So, also Winamp and Sonique are likely to need to find some money to come up with the licenses.
The licensing terms of Thomson and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, who are the owners of the mp3 patents, have changed. Now not only mp3 encoders but also mp3 decoders require a license. This page lists the fees -- it's $0.75 per decoder. As a consequence, Red Hat has already removed all mp3 players from the Rawhide development version |
What do you think ? Will this kill the MP3 format slowly and will Ogg Vorbis replace it?
Source: Slashdot.org
