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. 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? _______________________________________________ openwrt-devel mailing list openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
