On 2012-01-23 23:13:59 (+0200), Stathis Iosifidis (aka diamond_gr) <diamond_gr@freemail.gr> wrote: [...]
Regarding legal issues, SUSE Studio has a section that let's you add a licence, right? We can use that.
It's not about licenses (copyright) at all: all the software that is in Packman is under an open source license, mostly GPL. Libraries and tools such as mad, lame, ffmpeg, mplayer, etc..., are all under the GPL. The issue is software patents. Those are really two completely different things. So while e.g. mad (an MP3 decoding library) may be used with other software that is GPL, it may potentially not be shipped or used in certain countries where software patents are seen as valid, and are enforced. Most prominently, the USA. In the EU, the current situation is still that software patents are not seen as valid patents (patentability of algorithms, etc...), but organizations such as music industry lobbies or large software vendors from the USA and Japan keep trying to buy politicians to change that. In this particular case (mad), it potentially infringes patents because the implementation is based on a public domain implementation of the MP3 algorithms by Frauenhofer. The Frauenhofer Institut as well as a few other groups (such as Thompson) are part of a patent pool that wants to enforce their patents, especially on MP3. Practically, that means that they want everyone who uses or at least ships an MP3 algorithm implementation (for encoding or decoding) to pay royalties to them. So, as you can see, it is a very different problem. Essentially the reason Packman exists (but also because there was no OBS nor facilities for third party package repositories a long time ago when Packman was started -- remember that it predates openSUSE by quite some years), as Packman is hosted in Germany and, hence, in a region of the world where software patents are (at least currently) not seen as valid by courts and, hence, not enforced. (They are granted by the EPO (European Patent Office) though, which, unlike its name would like to suggest, is not an organism of the EU... oh well, go figure, the bottom line is: it is _very_ complex). My personal opinion on this, which I believe is rather qualified, is that it is *NOT* possible to build an openSUSE spin with SUSE Studio that contains packages that potentially infringe on software patents, for the simple reason that no somewhat larger business would want to take the risk to host it on its infrastructure (specifically, the risk of being sued for distributing software that uses patented algorithms without paying royalties for the right of using them). If it was okay to have openSUSE spins that include such packages on SUSE Studio, then it would also be okay to package those packages on build.opensuse.org. And it isn't. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that's accurate. cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green __v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf