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

[Philipp Überbacher]

Excerpts from C Anthony Risinger's message of 2011-05-07 18:24:38 +0200:
> On Sat, May 7, 2011 at 11:18 AM, Pierre Schmitz <pierre at archlinux.de> 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.
> 
> a bit of a divergence ... but as i think about next-gen packaging
> quite a bit i've often considered if a most advanced distribution
> system would negate issues like this ... for example, what if a
> nonfree package _knew_ it was nonfree, and therefore would only be
> distributed from servers in countries that do not deem it an issue?
> when user went to to sync it, their IP would be geolocated (or just a
> setting, eg. RESIDENT) and if need be the user would be warned that
> the package they are synced may have unknown legal implications.
> 
> would something like that work?
> 
> C Anthony

Too complicated, error prone and not really adding anything.