Xmms and RH8

Craig White plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
17 Oct 2002 12:39:00 -0700


On Thu, 2002-10-17 at 11:20, yarddog wrote:
> there is no multimedia included in rh 8
> 
> On Fri, 2002-10-18 at 07:13, Don Calfa wrote:
> > 
> > Just installed RH8 and Xmms doesn't work. Anybody else having glitches?
----
There are 2 issues that RedHat has steadfastly refused to support.

Proprietary licensing & lack of full source code.

In the event of MP3, I believe that the source code is widely available
but companies now have to pay licensing fees to use it. In the case of
Adobe Acrobat Reader, Nvidia drivers and others, the source code isn't
available and thus, none of this is included in the redhat
distributions. MP3 was part of earlier distributions but that was before
the copyright holder announced a licensing program.

My guess is that most of the linux distro's will not include MP3 enabled
players in the future as well.

Craig