According to this post on Slashdot, Thomson Multimedia has imposed stiff licensing fees for developers of MP3 encoders and decoders. By the way, it’s the minimum yearly royalty fee that sucks, especially since most small open-source projects have no money, only spare time.

Fearing the imminent demise of MP3 applications that are free as in “beer” (e.g. Winamp) and free as in “speech” (e.g. LAME), the Slashdot crowd is “rushing” over to an open format for music files, such as Ogg Vorbis, which has been popular among the 1337 g33k set for the last year or so.

Does anyone really believe that all of the MP3 players are going to vanish because of this? I mean, the payer of these royalties are the authors / distrubutors of the software, not the end users (unless, of course, the price gets passed along to consumers). The worst I can see happening is that there can be no more “free” or “open” work on MP3 encoders and decoders, which is bad in the short term. Us end users could continue to use and install the current MP3 applications, thanks to the wonderful tendancy of the Internet to be the world’s biggest backup device.

As for Ogg: I don’t consider it a viable alternative as many of us have sunk money into music jukeboxes (e.g. iPod, Nomad JukeBox) which currently don’t support anything but the MP3 and WMA formats.

Can someone please explain why this is a big deal all of the sudden? I get the feeling that Thomson has had this schedule of fees posted for a while now and someone just ran across them and posted them on Slashdot. Or, am I wrong? Did someone get fined for not paying their royalties to Thomson?

[Addendum: the Boston Globe has a nice overview on Ogg.]