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

[andre999]

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