Fluendo has made a royalty-free, MIT-licensed MP3 plugin for GStreamer available. This is their info on Linux distributions who want to include it: The redistribution contract Any distribution or Unix maker out there who want to include the Fluendo MP3 plug-in with their distribution can do so by just signing a contract with Fluendo to become an official redistributor. This contract includes no monetary compensation to Fluendo for getting the right to redistribute the Fluendo MP3 plug-in and no demands of additional purchases from Fluendo. The main purpose of the contract is to satisfy our upstream contractual requirements. By signing this contract any distribution can support mp3 out of the box without any additional license fee. Take a look at the example contract and contact us at info@fluendo.com for details.
What do you think we should do re: this plugin?
If I read their licensing info correctly, any distro can just sign the redistribution contract and then ship the binary plugin. Doing so would allow Gentoo to have an MP3 GStreamer plugin not threatened by patent issues. I'm against software patents, but having this in the tree would help insulate the Gentoo community from disruptions caused by tech-illiterate courts and industry-owned legislators.
I think the trustees needs to get in touch with fluendo to get this going but since Zaheer knows this process maybe he could give us how to do it.
Pinging Gstreamer folks in case this got lost: While the Bilski decision in the US has apparently made software patents harder to enforce here, it's possible the Supreme Court could overturn this when they hear this case in the fall. Other jurisdictions outside the US still have to deal with this issue. I still think the effort involved in getting a fully unencumbered MP3 plugin in the tree is worth it.
This Fluendo plugin isn't really a thing these days anymore. Use media-plugins/gst-plugins-mpg123 for MP3 decoding.
