Since OpenWrt is NOT US Based and in fact it appears to be mostly
supported with EU contributions, we should be following the more liberal
EU policies.
Personally I am against software patents and I campaigned for the
decision that the EU parliament took to ban them despite significant
lobby from US corporations that would have wanted to limit and
monopolize software development.
As we know US companies even patent human genome, which is absurd.
I am proud of the EU decision and I believe that OpenWrt should be
aligned with that spirit.
Best regards,
Mauro
On 07/08/2020 21:41, Rosen Penev wrote:
On Mon, Aug 3, 2020 at 9:11 AM Etienne Champetier
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Rosen,
Le lun. 3 août 2020 à 00:04, Rosen Penev <[email protected]> a écrit :
Recently there's been a pull request to get patented functionality in
the packages feed: https://github.com/openwrt/packages/pull/12992
Which pointed me to this lovely description: https://www.videolan.org/legal.html
Two excerpts:
In the USA, you should check out the US Copyright Office decision that
allows circumvention in some cases.
VideoLAN is NOT a US-based organization and is therefore outside US
jurisdiction.
Neither French law nor European conventions recognize software as
patentable (see French section below).
Therefore, software patents licenses do not apply on VideoLAN software.
The commit that disabled patented packages is:
https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/commit/dc555d003c21679c8c94ac7f5c74cbd5cd089ae0
This caused controversy regarding ffmpeg at the time since it meant
that minidlna would be unavailable.
Which brings me to my question. How should BUILD_PATENTED be treated?
OpenWrt as far as I know is not US based.
OpenWrt is represented by a US non profit, so not sure where it is based.
https://openwrt.org/about
The remerged OpenWrt project is legally represented by the Software in the
Public Interest (SPI) - an US 501(c)(3) non-profit organization which is
managing our OpenWrt trademark, handling our donations and helping us with
legal problems.
Software Freedom Conservancy (future replacement of SPI) is also US based
Sounds problematic then.
Best
Etienne
Whenever discussion about patents arise, I usually point to Fedora
whose parent company is Red Hat, which is based in the US. There are
many things that they do not distribute that OpenWrt does for legal
reasons. Should Fedora's practices be mirrored or should a more
liberal policy regarding patented functionality be taken?
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