On 05/07/2011 11:17 AM, Mauro Santos wrote:

On 07-05-2011 17:05, Loui Chang wrote:

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Or the distro could purchase or otherwise aquire licenses to all claimed patents... ha... ha...

... and then you fall out of bed and wake up. Either that or someone with very very very deep pockets needs to finance that.

I agree that all this software patent stuff is getting ridiculous but it's what we have now. As far as I know most if not all distros (and upstream) are leaving the choice of using patented stuff up to the end user.

Before we run around thinking that the sky is falling, we must first answer the question "is the patent we are concerned with VALID?", "Who owns it?", and "Who has the right to complain about its use?" If someone isn't checking before disabling useful components of packages, then that is something we should think about doing. The UPSTO has on-line access to lookup and verify. It will list the owner, etc.. Intentionally crippling software base upon questionable patents is nuts. As I've mentioned before, the damages available for infringement are "profits received from the use of IP" Why OS distros with roughly $0 profits (total) are so paranoid about possible violation from a compiled in library that represents 1/100,000 of the distros' offering is a bit bewildering. Over the next few weeks, I'll take a look at the latest CLE papers I have on the topic and see if I can put together a little checklist that can help make sure we are only crippling the software legally that necessary. As for faad2/faac - ffmpeg doesn't have a clue if patents are involved: http://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html <quote> ...Also we have never read patents to implement any part of FFmpeg. ... What we do know is that various standards FFmpeg supports contain vague hints that any conforming implementation might be subject to some patent rights in some jurisdictions... </quote> What information or supporting docs are we relying on in removing faac & --non-free? Just curious really from a legal standpoint. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.

On Sat, May 7, 2011 at 11:18 AM, Pierre Schmitz wrote:

On Sat, 7 May 2011 12:05:21 -0400, Loui Chang wrote:

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On Sat 07 May 2011 18:32 +0300, Ionut Biru wrote:

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On 05/07/2011 06:28 PM, Grigorios Bouzakis wrote:

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Is faac support in ffmpeg causing trouble to other applications or was changed for licensing reasons?

licensing. if you need faac you should use abs to recompile it

Gah. All this licensing stuff is starting to get really annoying. Did Arch receive a patent license violation notice or something?

What is Arch's official policies when it comes to patents? It could have some widespread implications for the distro.

Or the distro could purchase or otherwise aquire licenses to all claimed patents...  ha...  ha...

Licenses and patents are different things. Some stuff cannot legally distributed and we respect that. This is usually proprietary/non-free software or packages like the Microsoft fonts. (Wasn't there also some mplayer codec pack that included some Windows dlls?)

On the other hand there are software patents valid in some countries which apply also to a completely free implementation. This means there are a bunch of packages which you are not allowed to use in the US for example even though they are licensed under e.g. the GPL.

a bit of a divergence ... but as i think about next-gen packaging quite a bit i've often considered if a most advanced distribution system would negate issues like this ... for example, what if a nonfree package _knew_ it was nonfree, and therefore would only be distributed from servers in countries that do not deem it an issue? when user went to to sync it, their IP would be geolocated (or just a setting, eg. RESIDENT) and if need be the user would be warned that the package they are synced may have unknown legal implications. would something like that work? C Anthony

Excerpts from C Anthony Risinger's message of 2011-05-07 18:24:38 +0200:

On Sat, May 7, 2011 at 11:18 AM, Pierre Schmitz wrote:

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On Sat, 7 May 2011 12:05:21 -0400, Loui Chang wrote:

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On Sat 07 May 2011 18:32 +0300, Ionut Biru wrote:

...

On 05/07/2011 06:28 PM, Grigorios Bouzakis wrote:

...

Is faac support in ffmpeg causing trouble to other applications or was changed for licensing reasons?

licensing. if you need faac you should use abs to recompile it

Gah. All this licensing stuff is starting to get really annoying. Did Arch receive a patent license violation notice or something?

What is Arch's official policies when it comes to patents? It could have some widespread implications for the distro.

Or the distro could purchase or otherwise aquire licenses to all claimed patents...  ha...  ha...

Licenses and patents are different things. Some stuff cannot legally distributed and we respect that. This is usually proprietary/non-free software or packages like the Microsoft fonts. (Wasn't there also some mplayer codec pack that included some Windows dlls?)

On the other hand there are software patents valid in some countries which apply also to a completely free implementation. This means there are a bunch of packages which you are not allowed to use in the US for example even though they are licensed under e.g. the GPL.

a bit of a divergence ... but as i think about next-gen packaging quite a bit i've often considered if a most advanced distribution system would negate issues like this ... for example, what if a nonfree package _knew_ it was nonfree, and therefore would only be distributed from servers in countries that do not deem it an issue? when user went to to sync it, their IP would be geolocated (or just a setting, eg. RESIDENT) and if need be the user would be warned that the package they are synced may have unknown legal implications.

would something like that work?

C Anthony

Too complicated, error prone and not really adding anything.

On 05/07/2011 12:33 PM, Yaro Kasear wrote:

and most Linux users don't give a damn if something is "nonfree."

That's precisely part of the problem. You are walking blindly into patent traps and the destruction of a mutually beneficial community just for the sake of convenience. Have fun with that. Jonathan

On Sat 07 May 2011 18:18 +0200, Pierre Schmitz wrote:

On Sat, 7 May 2011 12:05:21 -0400, Loui Chang wrote:

...

On Sat 07 May 2011 18:32 +0300, Ionut Biru wrote:

...

On 05/07/2011 06:28 PM, Grigorios Bouzakis wrote:

...

Is faac support in ffmpeg causing trouble to other applications or was changed for licensing reasons?

licensing. if you need faac you should use abs to recompile it

Gah. All this licensing stuff is starting to get really annoying. Did Arch receive a patent license violation notice or something?

What is Arch's official policies when it comes to patents? It could have some widespread implications for the distro.

Or the distro could purchase or otherwise aquire licenses to all claimed patents... ha... ha...

Licenses and patents are different things. Some stuff cannot legally distributed and we respect that. This is usually proprietary/non-free software or packages like the Microsoft fonts. (Wasn't there also some mplayer codec pack that included some Windows dlls?)

On the other hand there are software patents valid in some countries which apply also to a completely free implementation. This means there are a bunch of packages which you are not allowed to use in the US for example even though they are licensed under e.g. the GPL.

Ah yeah I'm making some assumptions. It would be nice to understand the exact reasons that the support was removed. I'm assuming that faac support was removed because of patent issues, and that ffmpeg does conform to the MPEG-2 NBC/MPEG-4 Audio standards. The license of the code itself [1] would not seem to necessarily forbid binary distribution. The reason that it is incompatible with LGPL is because the original license allows free license only to products which conform to the MPEG-2 NBC/MPEG-4 Audio standards. Relicensing all of the code as LGPL would nullify that requirement which is not allowed. [1] http://faac.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/faac/faac/README?revision=1.7

On 05/07/2011 03:43 PM, Ionut Biru wrote:

On 05/07/2011 09:21 PM, Gergely Imreh wrote:

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Will be also unlinked from mplayer?

mplayer doesn't use system ffmpg

The question was aimed at the fact thatt mplayer too has faac as depends...

As an opinion: I'd rather not want to recompile mplayer every time there's an update, been there before because of other reason, it's not much fun. Using mencoder to convert avis to mp4 to use on Android: those _do_ require faac, as much as I can tell....

Greg

now i understand the question. It won't be removed. I did it for ffmpeg because it has a big warning after ./configure

License: nonfree and unredistributable

maybe mplayer does it right and doesn't link to incompatible licence

Many packages in Arch Linux are considered "non-free" in other distros this is what I much like about Arch Linux :) -- Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi \cos^2\alpha + \sin^2\alpha = 1