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

[Michael Scherer]

Le lundi 09 janvier 2012 à 21:08 -0500, David Walser a écrit :

> 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.

You forgot that Mandriva didn't have any lawyers to begin with.
And Red Hat had problem with patents, like the 2 issues mentionned there
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/03/red-hat-faces-another-patent-infringement-lawsuit-over-jboss.ars

If you dig in SEC filling, you would see such problems in the past too.

Now, users should not fear patents, they would likely not be sued. And
to tell the truth, neither would the association or mirrors, that's not
the issue. This would be a issue however for some type of commercial
users ie a OEM shipping Mageia.

And if people really want to take users in mind ( and I said enough time
that I personally don't ), people should then keep in mind that most
potential users are not able to install a distribution and that the OEM
road is the only one for them. And this OEM road requires us to be clear
on patents to ease their work as much as possible, hence the split ( and
the split is also valid for non-free, because some non-free package have
restrictive licenses, like "not for commercial use" or stuff like that
).

And if we want to have people working on the distribution, we need to
make sure they are able to create a commercial offer around it without
too much risk or problem. OEM is such a way, as would various others.

While I would advocate a removal of tainted ( since I do not care of
users, nor commercial developers ), there is reasons to keep it to ease
the work of others.

Also, keep in mind that some people would not be aware of the patents
issues if there was no split in the first place, or would not know how
widespread it is. And I think we all agree that we should avoid a second
SCO-like case, this time based on patents, and one of the various step
to prevent that would be to make sure people are aware.

-- 
Michael Scherer