Re: Debian Project News - December 2nd, 2008
On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 10:29:08AM +0100, Johannes Wiedersich <johannes@physik.blm.tu-muenchen.de> was heard to say:
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> Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
> > sense. I wonder why they were dropped from Debian, is it not able to
> > participate in some of the Fluendo stuff or something else?
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> They were most likely dropped because 'Debian is 100% free software' and
> some of these multimedia packages are not 100% free. In Debian's
> definition of free software 'free' includes 'free from patents'.
AIUI, it's not so much that these are considered non-free as that we
can't safely distribute them, either because of their own license or
because of patent claims by some third party. If they were simply
not 100% free, they wouldn't be part of Debian main but we could still
distribute them from non-free. (IANAFM)
Daniel
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