[Centos] External yum and apt Repositories and CentOS4

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