Policy on BUILD_PATENTED

[Mauro Mozzarelli]

Since OpenWrt is NOT US Based and in fact it appears to be mostly 
supported with EU contributions, we should be following the more liberal 
EU policies.

Personally I am against software patents and I campaigned for the 
decision that the EU parliament took to ban them despite significant 
lobby from US corporations that would have wanted to limit and 
monopolize software development.

As we know US companies even patent human genome, which is absurd.

I am proud of the EU decision and I believe that OpenWrt should be 
aligned with that spirit.


Best regards,
Mauro

On 07/08/2020 21:41, Rosen Penev wrote:
> 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?
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> openwrt-devel mailing list
>>> openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org
>>> https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
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