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

[Anssi Hannula]

On 10.01.2012 04:08, David Walser wrote:
> 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.

The problem is that that "balance" was achieved by sticking packages in
PLF/main/contrib semi-randomly. For example, H.264 decoders and MPEG-4
video encoders are in main/core, while e.g. AAC audio decoders are in
PLF/tainted. If one'd put them into an order, IMO H.264 and MPEG-4 would
be much more prominent and tainted candidates instead of AAC decoding...
Also, in e.g. MPEG-4 case we have encoders both in core and in tainted,
e.g. we have ffmpeg in core, but xvid in tainted.

> 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.

Linux Mint provides a "No codecs" CD:
http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

Ubuntu has a patent policy (which basically IIRC says "rights owner or
packager, please contact us if you think there is an infringement, we
will investgate"):
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PatentPolicy

Note also that the Ubuntu Live CD and therefore the default Ubuntu
installation do not contain any codecs. By default Totem is installed,
however, and gstreamer is plugged into "gnome-codec-install" (which
seems really nice, do we use it?), so that wen you try to play an
unsupported video the first time, it will prompt to install the codecs
(it will also show a warning dialog about patents etc, but AFAICS this
comes from gnome-codec-install itself, not Ubuntu).

If the user installs a video player depending on ffmpeg, e.g. VLC via
the software center, the codecs in ffmpeg will be pulled "normally",
i.e. silently.

Linux Mint had also gstreamer plugged to gnome-codec-install, so the
codecs will be installed if the user tries to play such a video with
totem (again with warnings).

-- 
Anssi Hannula