Brainstorming for UDS-P

[Martin Owens]

On Tue, 2011-10-11 at 05:41 +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> beyond what's normally considered free software 

With this meta package it gets very tricky, firstly because we've got
four issues: distribution rights, copyrights, patents and one special
case of DMCA issues. Most of the software/content in the package is free
software and only 3 hack scripts pull in non-free software/content:

ubuntu-restricted-addons (meta)
 - adobe-flashplugin - Non-free software
 - flashplugin-installer - Hack script because we can't convince adobe
to change their distribution license.
 - gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg - Free software, lib issues*
 - gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 - Non-free, not sure why we're using this
instead of libmad which is free software.
 - gstreamer0.10-pitfdll - pulls in w32codecs which contains very
certainly copyright infringing dlls (long time since I rechecked this
though).
 - gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad - Free software, lib issues*
 - gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly - Free software, lib issues*, pulls in
libmad (mp3 dupe?) and libdvdread4 which is a hack to install a script
to install libdvdcss because we can't be sure if libdvdcss falls under
the DMCA safe harbour so we do the wrong thing.
 - icedtea6-plugin - Free software, but lots of users want the non free
Sun java-plugin because yahoo games didn't used to work with icetea.
Maybe we should tell our users?
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse - Free software, lib issues*
libavcodec-extra-53 - Free software, lib issues and packaging issues.
ttf-mscorefonts-installer - Hack script to install the Microsoft fonts,
unlikely we'll ever get a distribution agreement for this non-free
content.
unrar - Actually fixed by the FSF, there is no need for unrar-nonfree
any more and unrar could probably go into the distro/main/multiverse
(and probably is) so this should be removed.

* Library issues are mainly due to patent issues which we have no data,
we do know that certain libraries have a high probability of stepping on
known aggressive patent pools but without data we end up sticking all
media support together in a just in case package.

Best Regards, Martin Owens