On 08/18/2009 08:24 PM, Dominique Leuenberger wrote:
On 8/18/2009 at 20:10, Dave Plater
wrote: Hi, I'm packaging blender-2.49a as an upgrade for eventual submission to factory. The original source package contained xvidcore and I was advised to remove it. I am surprised as it contained a gnu v2 license and http://www.xvid.org claims it is an open source alternative to mpeg-4. Further googling finds this statement " /XviD/ is an ISO MPEG-4 compliant video codec." but brings up no trace of legal battles or such. I have honored the instruction to remove it but I just wondered if anyone knows why?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4
The issue is not of 'license' nature but of patents being upheld. As nobody will ever acquire a valid patent license for this application, it will not be distributable in many countries (mainly the United States of America, the home of the main sponsor of this project, being legally liable for the project).
Dominique
It's sad that an iso standard is patented (sorry it was patented and then adopted as a standard but then so was ms ooxml accepted by iso) and is preventing use of open source. I suppose a good guideline for what's allowed as far as multimedia is concerned is if it's only in packman then it's most probably a problem. Regards Dave P -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+help@opensuse.org