On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 11:40:28 -0600, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:
Moonlight is licensed under the GPL. Who cares what patent problems it might have in the US?
Of course this plugin is quite useless anyway (only works with firefox and those few sites using silverlight only seem to support the microsoft implementation). But I am fine with it if Daniel wants to maintain it.
Well, there are those of us here in the US and we do have US users and mirrors. From a reading of the Groklaw piece[1], I see it as "Microsoft can sue any users of the software that did not get Moonlight direct from Novell". The "Downstream Recipients" part of the covenant seems to NOT cover mirrors. This says to me that we'd be opening up our mirrors to being sued for redistribution of patented material.
OK, my response shouldn't have been taken too seriously. (I'll add more smilies next time)
As for the "Who care's what patent problems it might have in the US?" part - I care. US users care. US mirrors care.
The point is that once we care about patents we'll have to remove a lot of packages like openssl, mpeg/mp4 stuff, libdvdcss and who knows what else. It's virtually impossible to distribute software without patent issues. But there concern sound very much like we only care about patents when its from the evil microsoft company. So we should either care about patents with all its consequences or we should simply ignore them.
We've already taken steps to specifically appease the German audience (remember: we removed Analytics because of some German law), why doesn't this door swing both ways?
That's another story and you are wrong here. German law does not apply to al.org. These discussion about google analytics were about privacy not laws. But let's forget about this as it's offtopic anyway. -- Pierre Schmitz, https://users.archlinux.de/~pierre