[Mageia-dev] rehashing the faac issue

Mon Oct 29 20:32:58 CET 2012

On Fri, 26 Oct 2012, PhilippeDidier wrote:
+
+> Guillaume Rousse a écrit :
+>> Hello list.
+>>
+>> The case of faac package has been discussed several times already:
+>> https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1730
+>> http://www.mail-archive.com/mageia-dev@mageia.org/msg08059.html
+>>
+>> https://www.mageia.org/pipermail/mageia-dev/2012-June/016673.html
+>>
+>> So far, the conclusion was than we had no perfect solution to handle the
+>> case of a software being having both licensing and patents issue,
+>> whereas usually software only suffer from one of these problems only,
+>> and than creating a dedicated 4th repository was unreasonable. Hence the
+>> removal of the package from the mirrors (but not from our svn...).
+
+> unfortunately ...
+> three weeks after the last post on this thread
+> a long silence
+
+The problem is the following:
+
+1. faac cannot go into main (see 2 & 3)
+2. faac cannot go into tainted (it is not free software)
+3. faac cannot go into nonfree (patented in some countries)
+
+so we only have 2 options:
+A. ban faac and use the AAC encoder(s) we already have in mageia
+    or another one that can go into tainted
+B. add a special repository for faac
+
+I prefer option A and I patched a gstreamer based video encoding app to 
+use vo-aacenc instead of faac a while ago.
+
+
+     Christiaan
+