[Mageia-dev] 2nd Draft of a Letter to the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).

Fri Nov 9 01:55:51 CET 2012

Shlomi Fish a écrit :
+> Hi all,
+>
+> I'm including here a new draft of a letter we are planning to send to the
+> Software Freedom Law Center ( SFLC- http://www.softwarefreedom.org/ ) about
+> faac vs. cinelerra. (see the last meeting at
+> http://meetbot.mageia.org/mageia-dev/2012/mageia-dev.2012-11-06-20.09.html for
+> more information). Note that the SFLC does not charge for its advice (but
+> accepts donations).
+>
+> Any comments will be welcome.
+>
+> I think the only change is that I changed the opening line to "Dear Sir/Madam".
+>
+> Regards,
+>
+> 	Shlomi Fish
+>
+> --------------
+>
+> Dear Sir/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?
+>
+> We would appreciate any definitive legal insights on the matter.
+>
+> Sincerely yours,
+>
+> — Shlomi Fish, on behalf of the Mageia development team.
+>
+
+Wouldn't it be acceptable if the GPL code were *optionally* linked to 
+non-GPL code, that is linked to the non-GPL code iff it were available ? 
+(that is, if installed)
+We  could pose that specific question as well.
+Just an idea ...
+
+-- 
+André
+