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

[Loui Chang]

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