[vorbis-dev] Damning with faint praise?

[Kevin Marks]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/19982.html

MP3 owners get stroppy with open source coders
By Tony Smith
Posted: 26/06/2001 at 14:46 GMT

[...]
The MP3 partners won't win themselves any friends for their licensing 
policy, which has seen them bashing open source MP3 encoder 
development efforts.

Fraunhofer and Thomson's ownership of key technologies incorporated 
into MP3 allows them to demand royalties from anyone using their 
intellectual property. This despite the fact that MP3 is, nominally 
at least, an open standard. The fees apply to anyone who produces a 
commercial MP3 player and all MP3 encoders, be they commercial or 
freeware.

Hence the message Dutch developer 8Hz Productions ("two students in 
Amsterdam programming for the sake of learning") recently received 
from Fraunhofer regarding its open source 8Hz-MP3 software. Says the 
organisation: "We have received an email from Fraunhofer (as have 
more developers) to negotiate the licensing for the MP3 encoder. As 
we are poor students, paying the license is not really a viable 
option."

Fraunhofer wanted $25,000 a year from the two students

[...]

Either project - or any other open source MP3 encoder, for that 
matter - could check out the open source codec, Ogg Vorbis, which 
offers comparable size and sound quality to MP3. We don't know if 
it's any good, and it's unlikely - for the time being at least - to 
be supported by portable music players, but with every aspect of its 
structure - encoder, decoder, data format - issued under the GPL 
(some bits come under the remit of the BSD licence), it's free to use.

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