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

Tue Jan 10 21:46:06 CET 2012

Le lundi 09 janvier 2012 à 21:08 -0500, David Walser a écrit :
+
+> 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.
+
+You forgot that Mandriva didn't have any lawyers to begin with.
+And Red Hat had problem with patents, like the 2 issues mentionned there
+http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/03/red-hat-faces-another-patent-infringement-lawsuit-over-jboss.ars
+
+If you dig in SEC filling, you would see such problems in the past too.
+
+Now, users should not fear patents, they would likely not be sued. And
+to tell the truth, neither would the association or mirrors, that's not
+the issue. This would be a issue however for some type of commercial
+users ie a OEM shipping Mageia.
+
+And if people really want to take users in mind ( and I said enough time
+that I personally don't ), people should then keep in mind that most
+potential users are not able to install a distribution and that the OEM
+road is the only one for them. And this OEM road requires us to be clear
+on patents to ease their work as much as possible, hence the split ( and
+the split is also valid for non-free, because some non-free package have
+restrictive licenses, like "not for commercial use" or stuff like that
+).
+
+And if we want to have people working on the distribution, we need to
+make sure they are able to create a commercial offer around it without
+too much risk or problem. OEM is such a way, as would various others.
+
+While I would advocate a removal of tainted ( since I do not care of
+users, nor commercial developers ), there is reasons to keep it to ease
+the work of others.
+
+Also, keep in mind that some people would not be aware of the patents
+issues if there was no split in the first place, or would not know how
+widespread it is. And I think we all agree that we should avoid a second
+SCO-like case, this time based on patents, and one of the various step
+to prevent that would be to make sure people are aware.
+
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+
+