Re: Debian and Patents (was: Re: RFS: packagekit)

[Matthias Klumpp <matthias@nlinux.org>]

On Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:12:37 +0530, Praveen A <pravi.a@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/8/31 Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. <bss@iguanasuicide.net>:
>> I thought the patent encumbered software was banned from the repos due
to
>> legal risk to SPI.  I get my ffmpeg and mp3 stuff from the
>> debian-multimedia
>> repositories which, while good, are not official.
It is. Debian Sid ships a version of FFMpeg which has disabled patented
codecs etc.
The Debian software pool might be not completely free of patents, but the
most dangerous and important aren't shipped. Also it AFAIK does not contain
a lot of patented software.


> apt-cache policy libmad0 ffmpeg
> apt-cache show libmad0 ffmpeg
> 
> pravi@savannah:~$ apt-cache policy libmad0 ffmpeg
> libmad0:
>   Installed: 0.15.1b-5
>   Candidate: 0.15.1b-5
>   Version table:
>  *** 0.15.1b-5 0
>         500 http://ftp.de.debian.org sid/main Packages
>         100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
> ffmpeg:
>   Installed: (none)
>   Candidate: 4:0.5.2-3
>   Version table:
>      4:0.6-2 0
>         101 http://ftp.de.debian.org experimental/main Packages
>      4:0.5.2-3 0
>         500 http://ftp.de.debian.org sid/main Packages
> 
> It is in debian main. I was surprised to see even wmv/wma playing out
> of the box with squeeze.
Are you really sure? (Maybe I got something wrong, but this shouldn't be
possible and it wasn't possible on my Debian installation)

Cheers
  Matthias