[Mageia-dev] Faac and building upon faac

Wed Sep 21 03:47:31 CEST 2011

FYI your post broke threading (which seem somewhat strange as your
+User-Agent string says Thunderbird which should work fine when replying
+to lists).
+
+On 21.09.2011 03:14, Philippe DIDIER wrote:
+> 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...
+
+Copying reference code is not needed to comply with an international
+standard.
+
+> Faac i's the only way to create *.aac or *.m4a files without using a
+> proprietary encoder
+
+Incorrect, libvo-aacenc and ffmpeg both have non-faac AAC encoders
+(though they are currently less capable than faac AFAIK).
+
+> 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 ?)
+
+At least for PLF faac was put in free section because it wasn't widely
+known until recently (when this was brought up in ffmpeg-dev@ mailing
+list IIRC) that faac had non-free code.
+
+Ubuntu multiverse only contains faac. It doesn't contain vlc, mencoder,
+etc built with faac support.
+
+> 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...
+
+Patents are not the issue here, license is.
+
+> 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...
+
+-- 
+Anssi Hannula
+