[Mageia-dev] 3rd draft of Letter to the Software Freedom Law Center about FAAC

Thu Nov 8 17:08:34 CET 2012

On 08/11/12 15:28, Shlomi Fish wrote:
+> Here is the third draft - I have integrated Liam's suggestions and gave more
+> context for our dilemma.
+> 
+> Regards,
+> 
+> 	Shlomi Fish
+> 
+> 
+> Dear Sir or Madam,
+> 
+> I am writing you this letter on behalf of Mageia ( https://www.mageia.org/en/
+> ), which is a community-developed, operating system, based on the
+> GNU/Linux system and with a free-and-open-source (FOSS) core. We would like to
+> ask whether (and how) we can distribute pre-built packages of a GPLed program
+> (in our case, the video editor cinelerra) after it was linked to a library
+> with some proprietary and non-GPLed code (in our case, faac).
+> 
+> The longer story is that there has been some demand for including faac
+> ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/faac/ - the Freeware Advance Audio Coder),
+> which is both non-free in part and patent encumbered, in our distribution,
+> and to prepare versions of the appropriate packages for which it is an
+> optional dependency. These packages, such as cinelerra (
+> http://cinelerra.org/ - a video editor), are licenced under
+> the GPL, which restricts which code its distributed binaries may be legally
+> linked to.
+> 
+> So our question is: assuming we package faac as a package, can we still
+> provide pre-made and binary packages of GPLed programs that use it?
+> Furthermore, would this require receiving an explicit permission from the
+> copyright owner of the program under the GPL?
+> 
+> We would appreciate any advice that you can give to us on the matter.
+> 
+> Sincerely yours,
+> 
+> — Shlomi Fish, on behalf of the Mageia development team.
+> 
+> 
+
+Looks good to me Shlomi :)
+
+Claire
+