Re: No mention of "patents" in DFSG
Richard Spindler <richard.spindler@gmail.com> wrote:
> Debian Bug report logs - #423250
> RM: x264 -- RoFTPM; patent issues
>
> Explaination: Now - it contains mpeg4 stuff, try
> googling for "mpeg4 patent" once and you know why it needs to go out.
> ----------8<-----------
> Very precise.
I replied to the above off-list before realising it had been posted here
too. That is very annoying. Please fix your broken email client.
Please don't edit things like that to make them look vaguer than they are.
That bug includes a link to http://petition.eurolinux.org/pr/pr18.html
in that bug report, which explains the patents in question and links to
a list of them, which is archived at
http://web.archive.org/web/20020805003332/http://www.mpegla.com/l_patentlist.html
which may or may not be accurate or a problem, but at least one ftpmaster
thinks it is.
> And then there are things like faac and lame, where there is a lot of
> talking and stuff going on, but no complete, easy to find
> documentation of why they are not in debian.
Well, I found lame's omission documention very easily: Debian
Developers Corner -> Packages that need help -> Software that can't be
packaged -> LAME archived discussion. It eventually links to the
http://www.mp3licensing.com/ threat site.
I didn't find anyone even requesting a package of faac because its own
home page says "No binary distributions are available here, because
they require a patent license." http://www.audiocoding.com/faac.html
so it's unlikely to be accepted as distributable, let alone meet DFSG.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=306366 (faad) is odd.
I'm not sure what documentation would be helpful for these. They seem
fairly obviously problematic.
Regards,
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
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