[Mageia-dev] Faac and building upon faac

Wed Sep 21 02:14:44 CEST 2011

Anssi Hannula wrote /Tue Sep 20 17:29:44/ :
+ >Including faac itself is no less safe than other patent-encumbered
+ >codecs, since the non-free parts do not forbid redistribution.
+
+The only non-free and non GPL part of FAAC is the ISO MPEG reference 
+code which
+it is based on... to comply with this international standard (nothing 
+strange in that)
+everything else is LGPL .
+An international standard may not be modified,  for sure, and is surely 
+not GPL !
+And for this reason we may consider FAAC as non-free...
+
+Faac i's the only way to create *.aac or *.m4a files without using a 
+proprietary encoder
+(like NERO aac encoder that can't be distribuable... and is surely not 
+GPL !)
+But this may induce some patent problems (same as creating *.mp3 files 
+with lame)
+So FAAC needs to go in tainted ...
+
+
+What to do with this f****g non-free & tainted program
+
+
+  Thomas Backlund said in july
+https://www.mageia.org/pipermail/mageia-dev/2011-July/006560.html
+
+>  If there is a package that otherwise matches core or nonfree repos,
+>  but has a possible patent issue it ends up in tainted.
+
+
+
+
+Anssi Hannula wrote :
+ >However, the license of software 'x' may forbid (like GPL does)
+ >distributing a binary of 'x' which is linked against non-free code
+ >(which faac has), hence it may not be ok to build 'x' with faac support.
+
+Binaries of faac ; and vlc, gstreamer-plugins-bad, mencoder, 
+libquicktime built with faac-devel
+are available in :
+Debian-Multimedia repo
+Ubuntu-multiverse repo
+opensuse-11.4-packman repo
+fedora-15-ATrpm repo
+plf repo for Mandriva 2010.2 & 2011
+etc...
+
+These are well known and well used third party repositories
+I don't know if they they don't respect the GPL (plf didn't ?)
+
+The sources of these programs have some building options (allowing to 
+respect
+patent legislation in some countries...) and the distributions that want 
+to be worldwide
+reachable skip some of these options to build the binaries in their 
+official repos...
+letting third party providing the "full binaries" with patent potential 
+problems
+
+
+The mageia's tainted repo being a kind of optional repo (some mirrors 
+being free not to propose
+it to respect local patent legislation) may be used the same way as 
+these third repo...
+
+
+But if these rpms can't be provided by Mageia,  some unofficial third 
+party repos will appear
+like for other distro (need to create a new plf for Mageia ?)
+or let appear a Mageia International Backport or a Thac's Mageia rpm...
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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