Patent-free software where it makes sense

[Alex Puchades]

That's great news! Though I personally consider OGG to be technically
superior, but I guess that's slightly off-topic. Anyway.

I know one has to be very careful about breaking patents in general, and
I'm not even suggesting RedHat to do so. But I thought software patents
were only recognised in USA*, and invalid in almost every other country. If
that were the case, then there wouldn't be any legal issues outside the
USA. And so we could proceed to solve the other (technical, political,
economical and philosophical) issues left.

The root of this thread is, I want Fedora to provide the best User
Experience possible out-of-the-box. If subpixel rendering, for example,
can't be enabled in USA, then Fedora can't possibly use it. But why punish
the rest of the world for that single eventuality?

* Issues I plan to bring up in fedora-legal, once I've read a little more
about the matter.

--
Álex Puchades
El 10/06/2015 18:55, "Michael Catanzaro" <mcatanzaro at gnome.org> escribió:

> On Wed, 2015-06-10 at 16:04 +0200, Alex Puchades wrote:
> > I'm not simply proposing this software to be added to the installer,
> > but I'm proposing to discuss the reasons involved and if there's a
> > legal reason where simply pointing users to RPMFusion, for example,
> > would mean that Fedora is breaking patent laws.
>
> Hi,
>
> The short answer is that patent-encumbered software is only excluded
> when there is high legal risk. If we were to enable freetype's subpixel
> rendering, Red Hat would have to either pay $$$$$$$$ to Microsoft or
> else prepare for the inevitable lawsuit. The MP3 situation is better,
> since the last known patent expires in September; we'll include it in
> F23 unless the lawyers give us some unexpected reason not to.
>
> The long answer: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageKit_Items_Not_Fo
> und#Fedora_Position_on_Software_Patents
>
> Michael
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