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

Wed Jan 11 13:56:32 CET 2012

On 10.01.2012 15:07, Pascal Terjan wrote:
+> 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.
+
+Possibly, but how do you define that, exactly?
+
+Does a licensing program count as "enforcing" or do you mean something else?
+
+>>> 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
+> 
+
+
+-- 
+Anssi Hannula
+