Re: [PATCH] audio/abcde: Update MESSAGE

["Dr. Thomas Orgis" <thomas.orgis%uni-hamburg.de@localhost>]

Am Wed, 23 Jun 2021 10:19:30 -0400
schrieb Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>: 

> and it's not ok to depend (by default) on something that has
> license/distribution issues.   I'm really unclear where MP3 is these
> days (across most jurisdictions).

As upstream for the mpg123 decoder, may I point to

	http://mpg123.org/cgi-bin/news.cgi#2017-05-29
	http://mpg123.org/cgi-bin/news.cgi#2016-01-31

Quote:

After more than 20 years of existence, the mpg123 project reaches it's
namesake version number a second time, after we forgot to properly
celebrate version 1.2.3 (meaning: introducing some artificial bugs to
fix, reaching 1.2.3 before 1.3.0 so that there had been a version 1.2.3
— what a miss!). All glory to mpg123 version 1.23.0! Those 20 years
also have another point: The haunting software patents on MP3 encoding
and decoding are gone, at least in Europe, according to the Wikipedia
article (too busy to do a deep investigation myself, and IANAL anyway).
Seems like only you poor lot in the US of A have to wait until end of
2017. But even then: technology from the 1980s, patents from the
early/mid (submarine) 1990s, unencumbered use of MP3 player software
originating from the mid 1990s finally possible in the late 2010s.
Quite a spread. 


There were attempts to patent extensions to MP3 for multichannel stuff,
but that never catched on.


Alrighty then,

Thomas

-- 
Dr. Thomas Orgis
HPC @ Universität Hamburg