Royalty free gstreamer plug-in

[Patrick Barnes]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On 12/23/05, Patrick Barnes <nman64 at n-man.com> wrote:
> > By "the patent situation", I mean that MP3 is covered by patents, and
> > that to use or redistribute any technology that takes advantage of a
> > patented technique, you must obtain a license from the patent holder.
>
> Assuming this statement about requiring generally requiring a contract
> for patent encombered sourcecode is true and the statement that Fedora
> doesn't contract for patents is also true.. can you explain why the
> freetype package that ships in Core includes the source code for the
> patented byte interpreter?   You know the bytecode intepreter that can
> be re-enabled with a simple rebuild of freetype src.rpm by switching a
> predefined specfile macro  %define without_bytecode_interpreter from 0
> to 1?
>
> I honestly can't reconcile either claim you make about the general
> situation in a way the explains why freetype is shipped in fedora the
> way that it is.
>
> -jef
>
>   
The issue is that we don't just distribute the software in source form,
and we want users and downstream to be able to build and use the
software, too.  We would also need a patent license that covers all
users and downstream before we could include this in the distribution. 
We can't get a contract that does that for us.

-- 
Patrick "The N-Man" Barnes
nman64 at n-man.com

http://www.n-man.com/
-- 
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