You may not have heard of the Fraunhofer Society, but you’ve almost certainly used some of its inventions – notably MP3 (but it also contributed to AAC audio and H.264 video). Recently, many rushed to declare MP3 “dead” because Fraunhofer killed its licensing program and declared AAC the successor.
There seems to be a misunderstanding. Patents on MP3 decoding expired a couple of years ago, you can use any free implementation you wish and not pay a cent in licensing. Recently, patents on encoding expired as well (save for a couple of unimportant ones), so license-free software can create…