[Mageia-dev] Mirror layout

Mon Dec 13 21:23:55 CET 2010

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 02:44:21AM -0500, Ernest N. Wilcox Jr. wrote:
+>Consideration of software patents and copyrights does not constitute implicit 
+>support for them. It does however constitute explicit support for obediance of 
+>the law. Like it or not, patent and copyright laws do exist in some countries 
+>(especially the U.S.A. - my home), and it is our responsibility to take those 
+>laws into considertion (whether we want to or not). Laws can not be changed by 
+>ignoring them, only broken. People who break laws are criminals - no ifs, 
+>ands, or buts, about it. If the Mageia community chooses to opeate as a 
+>criminal organization, I will have nothing to do with it.
+I don't agree on most of the above, and i believe the last sentence to be
+offensive, but i will not retaliate lest it becomes a flame war.
+
+>We are discussing whether to accomodate software patent and copyright law in 
+>countries where it exists. I can see no way to avoud doing so. We can include 
+>patented software in our distribution if we choose to do so (and I think we 
+>should), but we must provide both mirror hosts and end users (including me) a 
+>method of easily excluding such software. By doing so, we give our users and 
+>supporters the freedom to choose to obey the law where they live and still use 
+>or support our distribution.
+The biggest problem is the variety of patent laws existing in the world,
+besides the fact that patents are not granted worldwide, thus forcing
+mageia to taint software that should not be under different
+legislations. See the difference between fair-use clauses in laws about
+circumvention devices.
+
+>As I see it, we already have a usable mirror lay-out (posted earlier in this 
+>thread). The only real discussion that should remain is whether to include the 
+>"tainted" branch in the official Mageia tree, or to offer it in an alternate 
+>repository such as PLF (my earlier suggestion).
+I don't believe a separate repository would give any benefit, in any
+case it would be software provided by mageia, and built on mageia
+build-cluster.
+
+>In either case, I do not believe that ALL patented (or Copyrighted) software 
+>should be placed there (in the "tainted" branch). Some such software comes 
+>with explicit permission to use (perhaps nVidia and/or ATI drivers?). In other 
+>cases, we may be able to contact the patent or copyright holder and get 
+>explicit permission to include their software in our distribution. In such 
+>cases, we should be able to safely (for both our users and supporters) include 
+>the patented / copyrighted software with the official branch of our 
+>distribution.
+Software with non-free license but permission to distribute should end
+in non-free, software with a non-free license and no permission to
+distribute should not be distributed. But this is a very different issue
+from free-software possibly breaking some patent. Please do not mix the
+two issues.
+
+L.
+
+-- 
+Luca Berra -- bluca at vodka.it
+