Re: Personal analysis about thread/flame/discussion/project/GR/removing-non-free/...
[brian: you're using a version of mutt which emits broken
Mail-Followup-To headers, listing your email address as <bem>]
On Sun, Jun 11, 2000 at 11:53:31AM -0700, brian moore wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 11, 2000 at 01:13:17PM +0200, Christian Surchi wrote:
> > People spent more resources for these threads/flames than for non-free.
> >
> > Generating flames in -devel is too easy, discussing concretely in
> > -project is a miracle.
> >
> > Removing non-free is trivial, doing something useful for people is more
> > difficult. Building non-free alternatives to most used application is a
> > real proposal.
>
> Okay, please show me one free mp3 player.
>
> Hint: xmms, alsaplayer, freeamp, etc, are not free: they are
> miscategorized by their maintainers, as they are using patented
> techniques which are controlled and licensed by Thomson Multimedia.
> They may be "free for personal use when provided at zero cost", but
> selling them or using them in a commercial setting is a violation of
> Thomson's license terms.
You are confusing free software, which is a reflection of /only/ the
license on the software itself, and software which you are free to use
(as opposed to being preventing from using due to some rather
surprisingly laws in the state you live in, and most critically
/beyond the authors control/).
Software is 'free' if the copyright holders grant the freedoms we
require in the DFSG, it's not affected by circumstances beyond their
control.
For example a GPL'ed quake may be illegal or restricted to over 18s in
Germany, but it's still free software. [aside: GPL'ed quake doesn't
exist as a self-contained game; no complete set of GPL'ed game data
exists. That's not the point here].
It is widely accepted that debian mis-characterises some software
which is in the 'patent-infringing' category as 'non-free'. AIUI, we
do this because it is often also the case that it's not a good idea to
put these programs on CDs.
1-line summary: Free software is about software licenses, not patent
licenses.
[I am compelled to note that if the copyright holder is /also/ the
patent holder, this is a grey area, and it is fitting to expect him to
license the patent along with the copyright]
>
> See http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/mp3-licensing-faq.pdf for the terms and
> conditions on software mp3 players.
FWIW, my understanding of the MPEG technology is that their claims
that they can patent DEcoding are ridiculous, since DEcoding is
basically a fourier transform. It's ENcoding that's clever ---
there's an asymettry in the whole idea, so more than one encode work
can correspond to the same compressed work. The whole 'clever' bit on
which they have the patent is the compressor.
This may not save you from a lawsuit, though ;-(
>
> You're probably as likely to be sued for violating the patents as you
> are for violating the IDEA patents, but "probably won't be sued" is not
> sufficient for classifying stuff as free, especially when the patent
> violates the DFSG with a discriminatory usage policy.
But I say again, the DFSG is about software licenses, not patent licenses.
--
Jules Bean | Any sufficiently advanced
jules@{debian.org,jellybean.co.uk} | technology is indistinguishable
jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk | from a perl script
Reply to: