On Saturday, May 07, 2011 22:46:29 Jonathan Beatty wrote: > On 05/07/2011 12:33 PM, Yaro Kasear wrote: > > and most Linux users don't give a damn if something is > > "nonfree." > > That's precisely part of the problem. You are walking blindly into > patent traps and the destruction of a mutually beneficial community just > for the sake of convenience. > > Have fun with that. > > Jonathan Well, don't mistake "patented" for "patent poisoned." I haven't seen much of a case for ffmpeg being in "patent trap" territory. I personally believe software patents are evil, but I'm hardly going to let Stallmanist politics stop me from getting a functional desktop. It's your kind of thinking that motivates the GPLv3, and it's your kind of thinking that's the reason the GPLv3 is so unpopular. That said, I do tend to avoid things like Mono which are much closer to "patent trap" territory than ffmpeg. I also favor things like Ogg over MP3 or AVI. Largely also because I find things made in Mono are tripe and that Ogg Vorbis sounds better than MP3 and Theora is more fantastic than AVI. A little common sense is required here. Even in the unlikely event anyone's actually ever going to sue over faac, it's not even going to target end users. Such lawsuits rarely do. Secondly, if it does, all it results in is a fork that removes the patented parts. That's the "magic" of FOSS. Patents can't really kill it. Knowing this, I'd rather we don't drop a well-supported feature of ffmpeg just because some people think there *might* be a patent problem. 99.9% of patents that encompass FOSS projects are ignored by the patent holders, even if they know that the patents are "infringed." Largely because the patent holders know we're not exploiting their patents for our gain. That remaining 0.1% are the kind of entities that want to see things like Linux dead and buried because it threatens their bottom line. It's not about royalties so much as it's about bullying the competition. I'm serious, though. If we worry about "questionable patents" like you are we may as well chuck the majority of the packages in [core], [extra], and [community] into the AUR, because I promise they will ALL touch in some way on some patent somewhere, largely because patents, especially in the US, are handed out like candy. So, rather than succumb to fear of patents and making the majority of the packages in Arch useless, leave them how they are and let the vocal minority who honestly thinks we'd get sued over faac use the abs to build a custom ffmpeg package that has no faac support. In a nutshell: Quit crippling my distribution just because you're scared of patents just because Richard Stallman told you to be.
