[Mageia-dev] Faac and building upon faac

[Florian Hubold]

Am 21.09.2011 02:14, schrieb 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 !)
This is simply not true, there is vo-aacenc and there is also ffaac, both from 
ffmpeg.
> 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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