On 03/16/2016 06:03 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
| From: Rick Stevens <ricks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
| Keep in mind that SuSE is not based in the United States and can, if
| they so choose, thumb their noses at US patent and copyright law. Red
| Hat IS based in the US and cannot (well, will not) knowingly violate US
| law.
1. US has a nasty habit of "extraterritoriality"
2. patents are on a country-by-country basis
3. copyrights are universal among Berne Convention signatories (US was a
latecomer). That spells out minimum copyright rights but many
jurisdictions extend them. Jurisprudence certainly varies.
4. CDDL vs GPLv2 is a copyright issue.
5. Germany doesn't have East Texas.
| This is is one reason MP3 decoders, for example, are not part of the
| standard Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS distributions as there is a patent on
| it. Not everyone agrees that the patent is legitimate or enforceable,
| but it is present.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing.2C_ownership_and_legislation>
Read that and laugh/cry. It's been a LONG time since disclosure.
Which is why I said it may not be legitimate or enforceable. Red Hat
has, I think wisely, decided that the potential legal issues really
aren't worth getting involved in, so they don't distribute one.
If you want MP3, go download a (possibly illegal) decoder and have at
it. They won't stop you, but neither will they provide one themselves.
Similar issues come with DVD decoders (in fact, damned near any possibly
copyrightable media). Even most of the HTML5 stuff has latent issues
(some patents/copyrights owned by various entities). Most of them have
_claimed_ (emphasis mine) they'll never enforce them for use over the
web...but do you trust them?
Ok, enough tangential stuff.
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