Policy on BUILD_PATENTED

[Rosen Penev]

On Sat, Aug 8, 2020 at 1:37 PM Mauro Mozzarelli <mauro at ezplanet.org> wrote:
>
> 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 happen to agree but IANAL.
>
> I am proud of the EU decision and I believe that OpenWrt should be
> aligned with that spirit.
Do you believe that BUILD_PATENTED should be turned on by default?
https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/blob/master/config/Config-build.in#L64
>
>
> 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?
> >>>
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