[Mageia-dev] Faac and building upon faac

Wed Sep 21 10:20:11 CEST 2011

Am 21.09.2011 02:14, schrieb Philippe DIDIER:
+> 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 !)
+This is simply not true, there is vo-aacenc and there is also ffaac, both from 
+ffmpeg.
+> 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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