[Mageia-dev] 2nd Draft of a Letter to the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).

Thu Nov 8 14:12:35 CET 2012

Hi all,
+
+I'm including here a new draft of a letter we are planning to send to the
+Software Freedom Law Center ( SFLC- http://www.softwarefreedom.org/ ) about
+faac vs. cinelerra. (see the last meeting at 
+http://meetbot.mageia.org/mageia-dev/2012/mageia-dev.2012-11-06-20.09.html for
+more information). Note that the SFLC does not charge for its advice (but
+accepts donations).
+
+Any comments will be welcome.
+
+I think the only change is that I changed the opening line to "Dear Sir/Madam".
+
+Regards,
+
+	Shlomi Fish 
+
+--------------
+
+Dear Sir/Madam,
+
+I am writing you this letter on behalf of Mageia ( https://www.mageia.org/en/
+), which is a community-developed, operating system, based on the
+GNU/Linux system and with a free-and-open-source (FOSS) core. We would like to
+ask, whether and how we can distribute pre-built packages of a GPLed program
+(in our case, the video editor cinelerra) after it was linked to a library
+with some proprietary and non-GPLed code (in our case, faac).
+
+The longer story is that there has been some demand for including faac
+( http://sourceforge.net/projects/faac/ - the Freeware Advance Audio Coder),
+which is both non-free in part and patent encumbered, in our distribution,
+and to prepare versions of the appropriate packages for which it is an
+optional dependency. These packages, such as cinelerra (
+http://cinelerra.org/ - a video editor), are licenced under
+the GPL, which restricts which code its distributed binaries may be legally
+linked to.
+
+So our question is: assuming we package faac as a package, can we still
+provide pre-made and binary packages of GPLed programs that use it?
+
+We would appreciate any definitive legal insights on the matter.
+
+Sincerely yours,
+
+— Shlomi Fish, on behalf of the Mageia development team.
+
+-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------------
+Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
+Original Riddles - http://www.shlomifish.org/puzzles/
+
+Quark: “Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. But only for your customers”.
+Rule of acquisition No. 172.”
+    — Star Trek, “We, the Living Dead” by Shlomi Fish
+
+Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
+