As we were discussing the mp3 patent issue in the Mandrake IRC channels,
a thought occurred to me. I remembered that it's legal to distribute the
source code of something that breaks US software patent legislation
(because it's considered the blueprint of something that infringes
patent, not the device as such). This is already known to Mandrake - for
example, it's why the -mdk .src.rpm of freetype can include an option to
compile with the bytecode interpreter enabled (which produces the plf
binary rpm; compiling the same .src.rpm with it disabled produces the
mdk binary rpm). So if we do have to strip mp3 stuff from 9.0, could we
not simply include the relevant *source* rpms in all versions of the
distribution, together with extremely prominent instructions on how to
recompile them (or even an option within rpmdrake to do so), coupled
with the necessary warnings that doing so would be illegal under US law?
This would seem to combine the bare minimum of legal compliance with the
minimum possible disruption for users...just an idea.
--
adamw
