On Wed, 2002-08-28 at 11:05, Guillaume Cottenceau wrote: > US law is braindead enough to make that not illegal? > > 1- we provide sourcecode > 2- we provide a button in rpmdrake to compile it and install it > 3- as long as we have a text reading "continuing is illegal by > the us law", we are legal > > Really??? Time to change your laws, people! It's simple > nonsense..
Well - as someone says, making it so easy may be legally dubious. But the underlying point is entirely correct, i'm 100% sure of this. Under US patent law, you can publish a blueprint for a machine that infringes someone else's patent entirely legally, since you're not actually selling something *tangible* that breaks patent, you're just telling people how you could - theoretically - build a machine that breaks patent. I think it's considered that outlawing this would be an unreasonable infringement of free speech. The same laws consider the source code of software a blueprint, not a functioning machine that infringes patent, since you can't actually *do* anything with source code - it has to be compiled before it becomes a machine that infringes patent law. As I said, this is why Mandrake can happily distribute a source RPM for freetype that can be compiled with the patent-infringing bytecode interpreter, but it can't ship the binary library compiled with this option turned on; thus the single -mdk .src.rpm can generate both -mdk and -plf binary .rpms. It's also the reason why you can legally download the source code to LAME but not any compiled binaries. As someone pointed out in response to my original post - making it as easy as a button in rpmdrake might be skating on legal thin ice, so you should at least definitely take legal advice before doing that. But certainly, sticking the SRPMS on the main CDs and including instructions on compiling them, both within the distro and on Mandrake's website, ought to be perfectly legal so long as there's a disclaimer stating that it's a breach of patent to compile them in the US (unless, of course, you've paid your license fee). IANAL, so as a matter of course this should of course be checked with Mandrake's lawyers, but i'm pretty certain it's correct. -- adamw
