[Centos] External yum and apt Repositories and CentOS4

[Matt Bottrell]

Actually it's 'grey' in Australia.

The government and law makers are totally confused down here...


On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 20:11:21 -0600, Paul <subsolar at subsolar.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-02-20 at 13:09 -0500, Michael Jennings wrote:
> > On Saturday, 19 February 2005, at 17:36:34 (-0500),
> > seth vidal wrote:
> >
> > > mp3 support, for another.
> >
> > MP3 decoders are okay.  It's the *en*coders that are restricted.  As
> > long as we don't sell anything, we can distribute MP3 decoders for
> > free all we want.
> >
> > http://www.newsforge.com/business/02/08/29/1633205.shtml?tid=17
> >
> > Michael
> >
> 
> I don't think that Tomson Electronics terms are compatible with the GPL
> because of the restrictions.  I believe LAME (or any other MP3 CODEC
> under the GPL) is, in the USA and a few other countries, not legally
> GPLed because of the patent issues.  Because no commercial disto can
> include it legally for encoding or decoding.
> 
> Tomson/Fraunhofer may or may not have changed their minds in the past.
> They certainly could in the future if the wanted to.
> 
> External repositories could certainly if they wanted to make it easy
> enough to add themselves to CentOS by installing a RPM.
> 
> [rant]
> Frankly putting a note in the FAQ about the Patent/Copyright issues
> might be a little bit of encouragement for people that are not currently
> under such restrictions as USA, Australia (I believe), England, Japan
> and a few others I can't remember now to keep on their toes and block
> passage of such legislation.
> 
> If enough countries don't follow the USA's restrictions maybe us in the
> USA have a chance to overturn the restrictions we currently are under so
> that US companies can compete with the more rational world.
> [/rant]
> 
> Paul
> 
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