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

[Yaro Kasear]

On Saturday, May 07, 2011 12:26:54 Philipp Überbacher wrote:
> 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.

In my not so humble opinion, I don't think we should waste time kowtowing to 
the annoying politics of what's free or not when it comes to actual 
implementation of something. Keep the nonfree stuff there. No one is forcing 
users to have them, and most Linux users don't give a damn if something is 
"nonfree."