[Mageia-dev] rehashing the faac issue

Tue Oct 30 02:44:15 CET 2012

Christiaan Welvaart a écrit :
+> On Tue, 30 Oct 2012, Wolfgang Bornath wrote:
+>
+>> Nice to see that everyone went back to Start with this discussion,
+>> almost using the same words in their arguments. Is this really needed?
+>>
+>> There has been a wide consensus for the solution to put it into
+>> tainted as has been said in this thread as well. There are 2 options
+>
+> Each package in non-free must be inspected case-by-case to know if it
+> can be distributed/used, but their licenses are valid world-wide
+> (because copyright is pretty much universally accepted). The packages in
+> tainted can all be used/distributed *if* patents on software are not
+> considered valid in the country where the user/mirror resides. Do you
+> really want to mix those two?
+
+Don't quite follow the logic, but maybe I misunderstand your point.
+
+A package qualifies for nonfree if it is not open source (for whatever 
+reason) and there are no restrictions on its' redistribution, world-wide.
+All official mirrors are required to carry nonfree repos, as well as core.
+
+If there is some constraint on the redistribution of a package in some 
+countries, such as patent claims or encryption technology used or 
+whatever, mirrors in affected countries may reasonably want to avoid 
+carrying such packages.
+For this reason, we created the "tainted" repos, which are optional for 
+official mirrors.
+However we added the additional restriction that packages in tainted 
+must also be open source, to satisfy those that don't want to install 
+non-free packages.
+
+If we want to continue this additional restriction, we would have to 
+create another set of repos for packages that are both constrained 
+(tainted) and non-free, in order to carry such packages.
+However there are very few packages that meet this restriction.  Also 
+the tainted repos contain relatively few packages, compared with core 
+and nonfree.
+
+We could have used another approach.
+We could use a tag in the package name, or some other method, to clearly 
+indicate that the package in question is non-free.
+Thus making it easier for those who wish to avoid non-free at all costs, 
+to avoid installing non-free packages in the tainted repo.
+(But it still wouldn't remove non-free parts of the kernel.)
+
+Note that packages in the tainted repos aren't distributed on iso, so 
+that a user wanting tainted packages would have to download such 
+packages from the net.  And thus such a user could even avoid having 
+(uninstalled) tainted non-free packages on their computer.
+
+In sum, I agree with the proposal of this thread to allow non-free 
+packages in tainted repos.
+
+>
+>      Christiaan
+>
+
+-- 
+André
+