Royalty free gstreamer plug-in

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 12/23/05, Patrick Barnes <nman64 at n-man.com> wrote:
> One of Fedora's policies is to enable downstream rebuilds and
> redistribution.

1) Fedora already has software where rebuilds are constrained by trademark law.
I can not modify mozilla however i want and rebuild it and
re-distribute it as "mozilla" because of mozilla's trademark policy. I
have to get mozilla's permission to reuse the trademark and the
branding. Fedora is already rebuilding 'impure' in the trademark
sense.

>Contracts are a no-go, and it is still no more legal
> for us to redistribute the source code.

Are you absolutely sure its not legal to redistribute MIT licensed
source code without a contract for the patents?  That's not my
nonlawyer understanding.  My understanding is, for GPL codebases, the
GPL itself self-terminates your ability to redistribute the sourcecode
when the patent constraints your ability to use the binary.  This is
the first opensource, non-GPL codebase for mp3 that I am aware of, so
whatever understanding we have for how to GPL interacts with patents
might not completely apply.


-jef