Policy on BUILD_PATENTED

[Etienne Champetier]

Hi Rosen,

Le lun. 3 août 2020 à 00:04, Rosen Penev <rosenp at gmail.com> a écrit :
>
> Recently there's been a pull request to get patented functionality in
> the packages feed: https://github.com/openwrt/packages/pull/12992
>
> Which pointed me to this lovely description: https://www.videolan.org/legal.html
>
> Two excerpts:
>
> In the USA, you should check out the US Copyright Office decision that
> allows circumvention in some cases.
> VideoLAN is NOT a US-based organization and is therefore outside US
> jurisdiction.
>
> Neither French law nor European conventions recognize software as
> patentable (see French section below).
> Therefore, software patents licenses do not apply on VideoLAN software.
>
> The commit that disabled patented packages is:
> https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/commit/dc555d003c21679c8c94ac7f5c74cbd5cd089ae0
>
> This caused controversy regarding ffmpeg at the time since it meant
> that minidlna would be unavailable.
>
> Which brings me to my question. How should BUILD_PATENTED be treated?
> OpenWrt as far as I know is not US based.

OpenWrt is represented by a US non profit, so not sure where it is based.
https://openwrt.org/about
> The remerged OpenWrt project is legally represented by the Software in the Public Interest (SPI) - an US 501(c)(3) non-profit organization which is managing our OpenWrt trademark, handling our donations and helping us with legal problems.

Software Freedom Conservancy (future replacement of SPI) is also US based

Best

Etienne

>
> Whenever discussion about patents arise, I usually point to Fedora
> whose parent company is Red Hat, which is based in the US. There are
> many things that they do not distribute that OpenWrt does for legal
> reasons. Should Fedora's practices be mirrored or should a more
> liberal policy regarding patented functionality be taken?
>
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