[arch-general] Drop non-free ?! (Was: Commit in ffmpeg/trunk)

[Pierre Schmitz]

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:
>> >Ionut Biru wrote:
>> >>
>> >>drop nonfree stuff, fix headers
>> >>
>> >>Modified: PKGBUILD
>> >>===================================================================
>> >>--- PKGBUILD	2011-05-07 11:29:11 UTC (rev 122937)
>> >>+++ PKGBUILD	2011-05-07 11:51:04 UTC (rev 122938)
>> >>@@ -5,26 +5,28 @@
>> >>
>> >>-depends=('bzip2' 'lame' 'sdl' 'libvorbis' 'faac' 'xvidcore' 'zlib' 'x264' 'libtheora' 'opencore-amr' 'alsa-lib' 'libvdpau' 'libxfixes' 'schroedinger' 'libvpx' 'libva' 'openjpeg')
>> >>+depends=('bzip2' 'lame' 'sdl' 'libvorbis' 'xvidcore' 'zlib' 'x264' 'libtheora' 'opencore-amr' 'alsa-lib' 'libvdpau' 'libxfixes' 'schroedinger' 'libvpx' 'libva' 'openjpeg')
>> >>-    --enable-libfaac \
>> >>-    --enable-nonfree \
>> >
>> >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.

Greetings,

Pierre

-- 
Pierre Schmitz, https://users.archlinux.de/~pierre