[icecast] ices 0.3 released

[Jack Moffitt]

> > Well okay, I can understand their attitude. But it seems more like a 
> > religious thing: "no mp3 is evil, we don't do that".

MP3 is patented.  We can't support it fully even if we wanted to.  This
restriction is what initially provoked me to seek out Monty and pour my
companies resources into Vorbis in the first place.

> Why don't you try, for a moment, to look at it in a purely competitive way:
> why should xiph.org build support for their competition into one of
> their products?

Well, we try and support it where we feel comfortable doing so to
provide a nice upgrade path for users.  We realize that turning off MP3
streams and turning on Ogg is not going to work very well, but that
giving people the option and encourging one over the other will probably
have the desired effect.

> And, btw, nobody stops anybody from implementing all that you mentioned
> (apart from the owners of those formats) in icecast[12].  That's what Free
> Software is all about.  It's just that it won't be in the official release
> (if xiph.org doesn't okay it, of course).

We can't support all the features in ices for mp3 in any binary version,
because encode is heavily patented.  It's a _lot_ harder to get ices 0.3
working than ices 2.x working, since with ices 2.x all you need is to
download and RPM, deb, or similar package and you're done.  With ices
0.3, the only place you can get LAME is quasi-legally from russian (or
other) servers, and even then, running it is a patent infringement.

That said, the reason we haven't done it is because of finite time
availalbe, not because of some grand conspiracy.  None of us want to
write the code, because it's not fun to write code that isn't even
completely Free or possibly even legal to use.  The whole reason we
started this project was to get rid of these problems, so we're not
highly motivated to return to them.

We're lucky to have Brendan who was interested in fixing up the mp3
broadcasting tools.  As I'm sure he'll agree, we've done nothing but
encourage him in his endevours to support mp3 in icecast2, so I don't
see any reason for all of this silly conspiracy talk.  Remember,
basically none of us get paid to do this, so of course we will work on
what we like first.  You're welcome to fund a project you are interested
in.

jack.
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