[Mageia-dev] 3rd draft of Letter to the Software Freedom Law Center about FAAC

[Claire Robinson]

On 08/11/12 15:28, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> Here is the third draft - I have integrated Liam's suggestions and gave more
> context for our dilemma.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 	Shlomi Fish
> 
> 
> Dear Sir or Madam,
> 
> 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?
> Furthermore, would this require receiving an explicit permission from the
> copyright owner of the program under the GPL?
> 
> We would appreciate any advice that you can give to us on the matter.
> 
> Sincerely yours,
> 
> — Shlomi Fish, on behalf of the Mageia development team.
> 
> 

Looks good to me Shlomi :)

Claire