Re: MP3 decoder packaged with XMMS

[Diego Biurrun <diego@biurrun.de>]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2005 at 07:46:37AM -0400, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Jul 16, 2005 at 01:04:47PM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 12, 2005 at 01:49:17PM -0300, Humberto Massa Guimarães wrote:
> > > I was under the impression that Debian *did* have a policy: if the
> > > patent is enforced, towards it, then the software will go to non_US
> > > -- to the benefit of the sane jurisdictions (as is the EU, in
> > > principle).
> > 
> > And to what extent is that policy followed?  Neither libdts nor the many
> > multimedia players available in Debian appear to be in non-US.
> 
> As far as I know, non-US never had anything to do with patents and was
> only used for crypto, due to US export regulations, and Debian has never
> had a policy of distributing software violating actively-enforced patents
> at all.  I'm not sure where Humberto got that idea.

That was my recollection of things, however,

http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

states:

  Non-US/Main
      Packages in this area are free themselves but cannot be exported
      from a server in the U.S.
  Non-US/Non-Free
      Packages in this area have some onerous license condition
      restricting use or redistribution of the software. They cannot be
      exported from the U.S. because they are encryption software packages
      that are not handled by the export control procedure that is used for
      the packages in Main or they cannot be stored on a server in the U.S
      because they are encumbered by patent issues.

so perhaps that was what Humberto had in mind.

> > How can I get an overview of all the packages in non-US?  Looking on
> > Debian mirrors just reveals empty packages files:
> 
> Non-US is no longer used.

That explains my confusion.  I was under that same impression but
believed that Humberto might know better than me.

I presume that Non-US/Non-Free is no longer used as well?

Diego