Re: Debian and Patents
I was asked to comment on this as FFmpeg maintainer in Debian.
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 09:34:10 (CEST), Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
> In <AANLkTimrBa0hxTh3kQ-Fik9G57M8iQBZcJF1F0RYYcYQ@mail.gmail.com>, Praveen A
> wrote:
>>I was reading through the wiki and found this,
>>
>>* Debian does not include software that is encumbered by software patents.
>>
>>This statement is correct for Fedora, but we have many *known* patent
>>encumbered software in our repos like mp3 codec, ffmpeg etc. So I
>>think, this item can be removed.
Debian does not include software that is encumbered by *actively
enforced* software patents.
> 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.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=522373
No need to further push on this bug right now, AFAIUI our DPL is working
with ftpteam on it. Also there has been a related bit in his latest
DebConf10 report to d-d-a on that topic.
--
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4
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