[Fedora-legal-list] Chrome and VB?

[Michael Gilbert]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Tom Callaway wrote:
> On 12/18/2011 04:46 AM, Christopher Svanefalk wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I have been surprised that - despite their prominence - projects like
>> VirtualBox and Chrome (the open source version, built directly from
>> Chromium) have not been packaged for Fedora. I might be interested in
>> doing this, and just wanted to know if there are any legal hurdles to it
>> being done, in case that is the reason it has not been done yet?
>
> WRT Chromium, I have a Fedora package in a personal repo here:
>
> http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/chromium-stable/fedora-16/SRPMS/
>
> Unmodified, the bundled copy of ffmpeg would be a legal blocker for
> Chromium, but that package has the ffmpeg implementation separated out
> and all the legally troublesome material removed.

The debian chromium package uses system libraries (including ffmpeg).
You could take a look at the debian/rules file in the package to see
how that's done, and possibly use that to create a fedora port:
http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/chromium-browser.html

> The reasons why that package is not in Fedora proper are documented here:
>
> http://spot.livejournal.com/312320.html

Debian backports security fixes to the 6.x branch.  Perhaps it would
be fortuitous to work together on a jointly supportable chromium
"stable" version across distros as is done for "LTS" kernels now.

Best wishes,
Mike