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

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all,

I'm including here a 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.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish 

=================================

Dear sirs or madams,

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.

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