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

Tue Jan 10 14:07:17 CET 2012

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 03:20, Anssi Hannula <anssi at mageia.org> wrote:
+> The problem is that that "balance" was achieved by sticking packages in
+> PLF/main/contrib semi-randomly. For example, H.264 decoders and MPEG-4
+> video encoders are in main/core, while e.g. AAC audio decoders are in
+> PLF/tainted. If one'd put them into an order, IMO H.264 and MPEG-4 would
+> be much more prominent and tainted candidates instead of AAC decoding...
+> Also, in e.g. MPEG-4 case we have encoders both in core and in tainted,
+> e.g. we have ffmpeg in core, but xvid in tainted.
+
+I agree we need rules, but "being covered with patents" does not make
+sense, as the patent owner may agree with using it in free software.
+I think something like "No actively enforced patent" in core would be good.
+
+>> 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.
+>
+> Linux Mint provides a "No codecs" CD:
+> http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php
+>
+> Ubuntu has a patent policy (which basically IIRC says "rights owner or
+> packager, please contact us if you think there is an infringement, we
+> will investgate"):
+> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PatentPolicy
+>
+> Note also that the Ubuntu Live CD and therefore the default Ubuntu
+> installation do not contain any codecs. By default Totem is installed,
+> however, and gstreamer is plugged into "gnome-codec-install" (which
+> seems really nice, do we use it?), so that wen you try to play an
+> unsupported video the first time, it will prompt to install the codecs
+> (it will also show a warning dialog about patents etc, but AFAICS this
+> comes from gnome-codec-install itself, not Ubuntu).
+
+This looks nice
+