Technical board discussion of patent-encumbered media codecs in main

[Matt Zimmerman]

I don't remember seeing any followups on this...I agree that there's an
inconsistency, but I'm not sure that the aesthetics are worth getting our
"hands dirty" by making a lot of noise about the gray areas.

I doubt we have received legal advice in any way condoning this.  The reason
to leave them off of the CDs is that if someone decides the area isn't as
gray as we thought, and asks us to stop, we only need to stop the package
downloads, not ShipIt or the ISOs.

I agree that it would be useful to blacklist packages from ship; something
like this happened in one of the early releases.

xmms is in main for (as far as I am concerned) historical reasons, and
should be moved to universe without much of a fuss.

On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 08:51:22PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> The issue of patent-encumbered media codecs in the archive was brought 
> up at today's technical board meeting. The summary of the discussion is 
> broadly that current practice is to include patent-encumbered media 
> codecs in main where appropriate, providing that they are not in ship.
> 
> This is predicated upon the belief that including these files on remote 
> servers and only providing them to users on request is less likely to 
> leave us open to lawsuits than including them on pressed CDs. Scott was 
> of the belief that we have received legal advice of this nature. Is 
> anyone able to confirm this?
> 
> Tollef noted that it would be easy for these packages to accidently end 
> up included in ship as a result of dependency chains. Therefore, we also 
> suggest that it be possible to flag certain packages as "not-ship" in 
> order to avoid this eventuality.
> 
> James - does this broadly fit with your understanding of the current 
> situation?
> 
> Having noted all the above, there's a certain degree of inconsistency in 
> our current packaging. xmms is included in main, along with libmad. 
> However, I believe that all other media players in main have had mp3 
> support disabled. We /do/ provide mp3 support in universe, which leads 
> me to think that we'd be in pretty much the same legal position if we 
> enabled mp3 support in main (but not ship).
> 
> -- 
> Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org
> 
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-- 
 - mdz