I was thinking of the situation from the point of view of if a school system wanted to distribute applications or even an entire operating system within their district, what are known legal issues to avoid. I'm sure there are plenty of unknown issues that can't be taken into account, but somewhere there should be a list of what to be aware of with known problems in this area.
Alice Wonder wrote: > the only thing > I could suggest is look at what Fedora distributes since they do attempt > to avoid distributing patent infringing multimedia software. I definitely intend to do that. I thought that because some of the strictly GNU based distributions were very careful about copyright issues, they might be a good source of information as well. However, it looks like they mainly care about copyright issues, not patent issues. (There seem to be quite a lot of those to look out for too. http://libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines ) I also looked at some of the Debian builds, but they don't appear to be as strict as Red Hat. Matthew Burgess wrote: > That might > be another pragmatic approach to take; build your multimedia apps with > support for as many formats as possible so that you can decode anything > that you may stumble across. When producing your own media, though, just > use a combination of VP8 for video & Ogg Vorbis for audio. I did run across an interesting estimate on when certain patents run out at this site: http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_MP3_MPEG-2_H_264/ Not sure how that correlates with software like smpeg which according to various sources is supposed to be patent unencumbered and handle MPEG-1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMPEG For audio, I usually prefer wave format compressed with flac. That way, you have lossless compression. There are other options like wavpack, but I haven't really tried them out. There are also several comparison guides between lossless formats, such as this one: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison I also use midi format a lot with abc2midi and timidity. Freepats has some nice open licensed soundfonts. With those tools, you can produce your own music from pd sheet music or your own compositions. I haven't had much of an opportunity to look into video, but I thought Dirac Schroedinger ( http://diracvideo.org/ ) might be a useful option as well. It was developed by the BBC. It would be really interesting to see a comparison between Dirac Schroedinger and VP8. If anyone runs across other sources of information or multimedia source tarballs that try to leave out possibly patent related code and emphasize open codecs, please post. Thanks. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
