FOSSwire

Audacity is a very good free and open source audio editing application for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Unfortunately, due to patent restrictions, it is unable to import, export and manipulate MP3 files in the default install and this problem is usually present in the Linux version.

It is quite easy however to get the MP3 support up and running however, with a simple install of the LAME MP3 encoder and then providing Audacity with the correct location of the library it needs. Once you have this in place, MP3 support should work across the board.

I'll be showing this process on my Fedora 7 system, using Audacity 1.3.2 beta from the Fedora repositories but it should work with other Audacity installations on Linux (and other Unix-like operating systems too).

If you try and open an MP3 file at the moment, you'll probably be greeted with a message such as this one:

So let's get some LAME. You might be able to get this from your distribution, but that will usually involve enabling custom repositories, so it's often easier to compile yourself.

Head over to the LAME site and download the source code for the latest version (that's 3.97 here). Now it's pretty much a standard compile install.

$ tar xzvf lame-3.97.tar.gz
$ cd lame-3.97
$ ./configure
$ make
$ su -c "make install"

That final step will be sudo make install for Ubuntu and other distributions that use sudo.

Now that we have LAME installed, it should be a simple case of pointing Audacity back in the right direction. Back in Audacity, head to Edit > Preferences.

On the File Formats tab and under the MP3 Export header, click the Find Library button. Provided you installed lame in the default locations and didn't change any options, the library you need should be located at /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.so.

Choosing this file in the file selector should enable MP3 export (although I did have difficulty importing MP3 files and this may unfortunately involve a recompile of Audacity or finding a third-party package built with MP3 support enabled).

Done!

ZDNet Australia are reporting that a Sun executive James Eagleton has accused Microsoft of 'patent terrorism' over their recent deals with, among other companies, Linspire, Novell and Xandros.

"What we're seeing though now can be loosely described as patent terrorism, where people are using their patent horde as a threat," said James Eagleton, systems product manager for Sun Microsystems. "It's almost like a cold war stand over tactic; where I have these patents and if you breach these patents, I'm going to come after you and sue you."

"That's totally, from Sun's point of view, going against the spirit of innovation around software. No one, certainly in the OS development community, wants to have these doubts lingering over them, especially users," he says. "No one [wants a situation] where you have to think, if I go and use this open source software, who knows who's going to come after me for damages and claims."

Sun are a strong proponent of the open source model and have contributed significant amounts of code to the community and have opened up a lot of their existing products as well.

It's nice to see Sun feel able to make a stand on this issue and are putting their weight behind the general consensus of the community.

Now that the GPLv3 has been finalised and is now released (and we're starting to see projects adopting it), many of us in the free software community have been wondering what Linus Torvalds' stance is on the final version.

There has been controversy surrounding Linus' views on the new version of the licence and considerable speculation as to whether he would consider moving the kernel to GPLv3.

Linus particularly has quite strong feelings about the anti-Tivoisation clause in the GPLv3 which prevents embedded device manufacturers from limiting their devices from running modified versions of GPL-covered software.

No. The anti-DRM language is still there, and no, it was never a
misunderstanding. Now it's been limited to "consumer devices" (after I
pointed out some of the _obvious_ problems with the original language),
and the only people who called anything a "misunderstanding" were the ones
that tried to point to *other* points in the license altogether (ie there
was also a "drm section", which didn't really seem to say anything much at
all).

Rms calls it "tivoization", but that's a word he has made up, and a term I
find offensive, so I don't choose to use it. It's offensive because Tivo
never did anything wrong, and the FSF even acknowledged that. The fact
that they do their hardware and have some DRM issues with the content
producers and thus want to protect the integrity of that hardware.

The kernel license covers the *kernel*. It does not cover boot loaders and
hardware, and as far as I'm concerned, people who make their own hardware
can design them any which way they want. Whether that means "booting only
a specific kernel" or "sharks with lasers", I don't care.

It is all quite complex and ultimately just boils down to the age-old issue of idealism (as shown by Stallman and the FSF) versus the pragmatism of Linus and many of the kernel developers.

It's always difficult when you have such a diverse set of opinions within the free software community and inevitably because of the strong opinions on both sides people will disagree. Ultimately, it's an issue that is unlikely to go away.

Still it isn't all that clear what the final decision on the kernel licensing will be and it looks like for now the kernel will remain GPLv2 only.