[Mageia-dev] Faac and building upon faac

[Philippe DIDIER]

Anssi Hannula wrote /Tue Sep 20 17:29:44/ :
 >Including faac itself is no less safe than other patent-encumbered
 >codecs, since the non-free parts do not forbid redistribution.

The only non-free and non GPL part of FAAC is the ISO MPEG reference 
code which
it is based on... to comply with this international standard (nothing 
strange in that)
everything else is LGPL .
An international standard may not be modified,  for sure, and is surely 
not GPL !
And for this reason we may consider FAAC as non-free...

Faac i's the only way to create *.aac or *.m4a files without using a 
proprietary encoder
(like NERO aac encoder that can't be distribuable... and is surely not 
GPL !)
But this may induce some patent problems (same as creating *.mp3 files 
with lame)
So FAAC needs to go in tainted ...


What to do with this f****g non-free & tainted program


  Thomas Backlund said in july
https://www.mageia.org/pipermail/mageia-dev/2011-July/006560.html

>  If there is a package that otherwise matches core or nonfree repos,
>  but has a possible patent issue it ends up in tainted.




Anssi Hannula wrote :
 >However, the license of software 'x' may forbid (like GPL does)
 >distributing a binary of 'x' which is linked against non-free code
 >(which faac has), hence it may not be ok to build 'x' with faac support.

Binaries of faac ; and vlc, gstreamer-plugins-bad, mencoder, 
libquicktime built with faac-devel
are available in :
Debian-Multimedia repo
Ubuntu-multiverse repo
opensuse-11.4-packman repo
fedora-15-ATrpm repo
plf repo for Mandriva 2010.2 & 2011
etc...

These are well known and well used third party repositories
I don't know if they they don't respect the GPL (plf didn't ?)

The sources of these programs have some building options (allowing to 
respect
patent legislation in some countries...) and the distributions that want 
to be worldwide
reachable skip some of these options to build the binaries in their 
official repos...
letting third party providing the "full binaries" with patent potential 
problems


The mageia's tainted repo being a kind of optional repo (some mirrors 
being free not to propose
it to respect local patent legislation) may be used the same way as 
these third repo...


But if these rpms can't be provided by Mageia,  some unofficial third 
party repos will appear
like for other distro (need to create a new plf for Mageia ?)
or let appear a Mageia International Backport or a Thac's Mageia rpm...








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