Re: MP3 decoders' non-freeness
On Tue, 6 Aug 2002, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 06, 2002 at 12:45:12AM -0500, David Starner wrote:
> > At 08:49 PM 8/5/02 -0400, Joe Drew wrote:
> > >On Tue, 2002-07-23 at 14:49, Joe Drew wrote:
> > >> Has there been any resolution of this issue? Is it safe to close these
> > >> bugs?
> > >It seems there has been no resolution, but this is an issue we cannot
> > >afford to ignore.
> > Why? Honestly, we won't be the first to get sued - no blood from a turnip,
> > and all that.
>
> You mightn't have noticed but Debian is distributed by mirror sites
> hosted by a bunch of universities, ISPs, companies, and others all around
> the world. There's plenty of blood to be gotten from those turnips, and,
> heck, there's blood to be gotten from SPI, for that matter. In any event,
> opening our sponsors to lawsuits isn't the way we do things.
>
Software Patent is legal in some countries (like US and Japan) and
is illegal in Europe (in the article 52 of the Munich Convention). If you
care about Software Patents, you should take this point into consideration.
Another issue, If you take into consideration Software Patent, you
are putting argument for the Software Patent method. This is not good
at all as software patents is an important issue to innovation and
technical advances.
<mode="IMHO">
Please don't take software patents into consideration.
</mode>
Another point, asking for RF (Royalty Free) License to patenter is
a real pain. It's difficult and often impossible.
adulau
--
Alexandre Dulaunoy http://www.foo.be/
AD993-RIPE http://www.ael.be/
"People who fight may lose. People who do not fight have already lost."
- Bertolt Brecht
Reply to: