Policy on BUILD_PATENTED

[Rosen Penev]

On Mon, Aug 3, 2020 at 9:11 AM Etienne Champetier
<champetier.etienne at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
Sounds problematic then.
>
> 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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