[Mageia-dev] [RFC] Moving various packages/codecs to tainted

Tue Jan 10 03:08:02 CET 2012

Anssi Hannula wrote:
+> On 10.01.2012 01:30, David Walser wrote:
+>> Anssi Hannula wrote:
+>>> Hi all!
+>>>
+>>> As I've noted in some previous emails, our core/tainted media codec
+>>> split-up is currently arbitrary without any specific logic.
+>>>
+>>> As far as I remember, the tainted policy is that codecs for formats that
+>>> are claimed to be covered by patents should be there.
+>>>
+>>> Per that policy, at least the AC-3/DTS/MP3/MPEG-2/MPEG-4/H.264/VC-1
+>>> decoders and AC-3/MPEG-2/MPEG-4 encoders we have in core should be moved
+>>> to tainted section. Note that this will make most current
+>>> .mkv/.avi/.mp4/.mov/.wmv/.mp3 files unplayable without packages from
+>>> tainted section.
+>> 
+>> That's the absolute last thing I want to see happen.  It's one of the reasons Fedora and others that do that are not viable options for a 
+lot 
+>> of non-technical users, and it just makes it so you have to jump through a lot of extra hoops just to have a reasonably working system 
+>> (whether it's your own or for family members that you might be maintaining).  Obvouisly just about every codec in use has patents relevant 
+to 
+>> it, but I think we're OK to stick with the ones Mandriva shipped for years in core (like mp3 decoding) and things that were in PLF in 
+tainted 
+>> (like mp3 encoding) even if it seems arbitrary.  If anything, it'd be nice if more not-likely-to-be-problematic codecs could be moved to 
+>> core.
+> 
+> I'm absolutely fine with either moving codecs to core or tainted, as
+> long as we are at least somewhat consistent in what is in core and what
+> is in tainted. However, I do not really like the reasoning "we do it
+> like mandriva did no matter if it is sensible or not".
+> 
+> I'd possibly understand "we do it like mandriva did because they didn't
+> apparently have problems with these pkgs", but it IMHO wouldn't really
+> fly as we could just s/mandriva/ubuntu/ in that statement (and Ubuntu is
+> much more prominent than mdv IMO) and then everything would be in core...
+
+Sure, I but I think Mandriva achieved a good balance between respecting patents and not being overly paranoid.  I suppose you can't blame a 
+US company like RedHat for being overly paranoid, but as you said, Mandriva hasn't had any problems.  Are there any there examples out of 
+there of distros trying to achieve this balance?  Obviously we don't want to follow Ubuntu or ROSA in pretending patents don't exist.
+
+