[Mageia-dev] Faac and building upon faac

[Anssi Hannula]

FYI your post broke threading (which seem somewhat strange as your
User-Agent string says Thunderbird which should work fine when replying
to lists).

On 21.09.2011 03:14, Philippe DIDIER wrote:
> 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...

Copying reference code is not needed to comply with an international
standard.

> Faac i's the only way to create *.aac or *.m4a files without using a
> proprietary encoder

Incorrect, libvo-aacenc and ffmpeg both have non-faac AAC encoders
(though they are currently less capable than faac AFAIK).

> 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 ?)

At least for PLF faac was put in free section because it wasn't widely
known until recently (when this was brought up in ffmpeg-dev@ mailing
list IIRC) that faac had non-free code.

Ubuntu multiverse only contains faac. It doesn't contain vlc, mencoder,
etc built with faac support.

> 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...

Patents are not the issue here, license is.

> 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...

-- 
Anssi Hannula