[arch-dev-public] Moonlight in Arch Linux

[Daniel Isenmann]

On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 11:40:28 -0600
Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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

To fully clear that, I will contact the Moonlight developers. They
should give us the right answer for legal issues if we allowed to
distribute it without any concerns.