[Mageia-dev] [RFC] Moving various packages/codecs to tainted

[David Walser]

Anssi Hannula wrote:
> On 10.01.2012 01:30, David Walser wrote:
>> Anssi Hannula wrote:
>>> Hi all!
>>>
>>> As I've noted in some previous emails, our core/tainted media codec
>>> split-up is currently arbitrary without any specific logic.
>>>
>>> As far as I remember, the tainted policy is that codecs for formats that
>>> are claimed to be covered by patents should be there.
>>>
>>> Per that policy, at least the AC-3/DTS/MP3/MPEG-2/MPEG-4/H.264/VC-1
>>> decoders and AC-3/MPEG-2/MPEG-4 encoders we have in core should be moved
>>> to tainted section. Note that this will make most current
>>> .mkv/.avi/.mp4/.mov/.wmv/.mp3 files unplayable without packages from
>>> tainted section.
>> 
>> That's the absolute last thing I want to see happen.  It's one of the reasons Fedora and others that do that are not viable options for a 
lot 
>> of non-technical users, and it just makes it so you have to jump through a lot of extra hoops just to have a reasonably working system 
>> (whether it's your own or for family members that you might be maintaining).  Obvouisly just about every codec in use has patents relevant 
to 
>> it, but I think we're OK to stick with the ones Mandriva shipped for years in core (like mp3 decoding) and things that were in PLF in 
tainted 
>> (like mp3 encoding) even if it seems arbitrary.  If anything, it'd be nice if more not-likely-to-be-problematic codecs could be moved to 
>> core.
> 
> I'm absolutely fine with either moving codecs to core or tainted, as
> long as we are at least somewhat consistent in what is in core and what
> is in tainted. However, I do not really like the reasoning "we do it
> like mandriva did no matter if it is sensible or not".
> 
> I'd possibly understand "we do it like mandriva did because they didn't
> apparently have problems with these pkgs", but it IMHO wouldn't really
> fly as we could just s/mandriva/ubuntu/ in that statement (and Ubuntu is
> much more prominent than mdv IMO) and then everything would be in core...

Sure, I but I think Mandriva achieved a good balance between respecting patents and not being overly paranoid.  I suppose you can't blame a 
US company like RedHat for being overly paranoid, but as you said, Mandriva hasn't had any problems.  Are there any there examples out of 
there of distros trying to achieve this balance?  Obviously we don't want to follow Ubuntu or ROSA in pretending patents don't exist.