Royalty free gstreamer plug-in

[Stephen J. Smoogen]

On 1/2/06, Jeff Pitman <jeff.pitman at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/27/05, Nicolas Mailhot <Nicolas.Mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
> > Jeff Pitman a écrit :
> >
> > > Let's not forget that the "holier-than-thou" stance alienates quite a few users.
> >
> > And the permissive attitude of some distributions alienate others.
> > Fedora has to take one side on the IP rights debate. And no matter
> > which one is it, people on the other side will be "alienated" by this
> > choice.
> >
> > I don't think we need another Mandriva/Linspire in the Linux world.
>
> I was actually thinking more along the lines of Ubuntu. Universe is
> commented out in sources.list and it is extremely well documented on
> how to get MP3 activated. The same can be done here.
>

Actually no. I dont think Ubuntu is not formed inside of the United
States, while both Red Hat and Fedora are considered to be "Entities
within the United States" for the purpose of suing. In the US, a
simple comment and then document how to violate can be construed as
helping an illegal activity. While the US courts have been clear that
writing about how to pick a lock is not illegal.. they have not been
so clear with source code, depending on your Federal District it can
be considered illegal or legal.

I have no idea how Novell gets away with it.. it can be anything from
existing contracts/patent transfers to waiting to be sued so they can
fight that battle then. The issue though is that the standard suing
game in patents and other infringement claims is to go after smaller
players first and then go up the ladder with won cases as precedent.

--
Stephen J Smoogen.
CSIRT/Linux System Administrator