[arch-dev-public] Moonlight in Arch Linux

[Pierre Schmitz]

On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 11:40:28 -0600, Aaron Griffin
<aaronmgriffin at 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