[Mageia-dev] rehashing the faac issue

[andre999]

Christiaan Welvaart a écrit :
> On Tue, 30 Oct 2012, Wolfgang Bornath wrote:
>
>> Nice to see that everyone went back to Start with this discussion,
>> almost using the same words in their arguments. Is this really needed?
>>
>> There has been a wide consensus for the solution to put it into
>> tainted as has been said in this thread as well. There are 2 options
>
> Each package in non-free must be inspected case-by-case to know if it
> can be distributed/used, but their licenses are valid world-wide
> (because copyright is pretty much universally accepted). The packages in
> tainted can all be used/distributed *if* patents on software are not
> considered valid in the country where the user/mirror resides. Do you
> really want to mix those two?

Don't quite follow the logic, but maybe I misunderstand your point.

A package qualifies for nonfree if it is not open source (for whatever 
reason) and there are no restrictions on its' redistribution, world-wide.
All official mirrors are required to carry nonfree repos, as well as core.

If there is some constraint on the redistribution of a package in some 
countries, such as patent claims or encryption technology used or 
whatever, mirrors in affected countries may reasonably want to avoid 
carrying such packages.
For this reason, we created the "tainted" repos, which are optional for 
official mirrors.
However we added the additional restriction that packages in tainted 
must also be open source, to satisfy those that don't want to install 
non-free packages.

If we want to continue this additional restriction, we would have to 
create another set of repos for packages that are both constrained 
(tainted) and non-free, in order to carry such packages.
However there are very few packages that meet this restriction.  Also 
the tainted repos contain relatively few packages, compared with core 
and nonfree.

We could have used another approach.
We could use a tag in the package name, or some other method, to clearly 
indicate that the package in question is non-free.
Thus making it easier for those who wish to avoid non-free at all costs, 
to avoid installing non-free packages in the tainted repo.
(But it still wouldn't remove non-free parts of the kernel.)

Note that packages in the tainted repos aren't distributed on iso, so 
that a user wanting tainted packages would have to download such 
packages from the net.  And thus such a user could even avoid having 
(uninstalled) tainted non-free packages on their computer.

In sum, I agree with the proposal of this thread to allow non-free 
packages in tainted repos.

>
>      Christiaan
>

-- 
André