[2012-12-17 09:38:15 +0100] Sven-Hendrik Haase:
Personally, I don't think we care about patents enough
Unfortunately, many of our distribution's users, mirrors, and servers are located in jurisdictions that take software patents seriously. I do not think it is wise to put us at risk there, especially when these risks can be avoided easily like seems to be the case with S3TC.
I think plenty of stuff we have in binary in our repos is encumbered by patents
Like what? You appear to be confusing patent issues with licensing issues, the latter being what commonly concerns binary blobs (and in particular, being granted the right to redistribute them). Besides, if such a blob had a patent problem, I do not believe we would be at fault as we have no means of knowing how the blob operates (at least in jurisdictions such as the US which celebrate ignorance). Now, I am not a lawyer... -- Gaetan