[arch-dev-public] Moonlight in Arch Linux

[Aaron Griffin]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 11:28 AM, Pierre Schmitz <pierre at archlinux.de> wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 11:12:30 -0600, Aaron Griffin
> <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>>> However, isn't there some legal issues with Moonlight? I saw recently
>>>> that Microsoft "pledged" not to sue Moonlight users....
>>>
>>> There are no issues as software patents do not exist for us. :P
>>
>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems#Moonlight
>
> 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.

As for the "Who care's what patent problems it might have in the US?"
part - I care. US users care. US mirrors care. 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?

1: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080528133529454