I now make a vow. I will cease and desist in using mp3’s and the software that plays them. (or at least I’ll try to) Frauenhofer, the company that owns the patents on the mp3 encoding and decoding algorithms today announced a $.75 per player distribution fee, with a $60,000 one time fee for unlimited distribution for mp3 players. This is for software mp3 decoders. Apple can afford this. So can Microsoft, and AOL, and lots of other companies. But this fee has made it illegal to distribute any open source/free mp3 player (if you don’t have the $60,000 to pony up). RedHat has pulled all the mp3 players from it’s development distribution, and other Linux/BSD distros are too.
Now is the time to support Ogg Vorbis, a better than mp3 audio compression format that isn’t encumbered by patents, and the SDK for which is in the public domain. I hope someone comes out with a cd-based hardware ogg player soon. What really sucks is that I can’t use iTunes anymore since it doesn’t support Ogg. *sigh*
