Re: Heads-up: About to remove libdvdcss and w32codecs

On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 06:14:18PM +0100, Valent Turkovic wrote:
> How come you made the decision now? Did you get some letter from
> some lawyers?

No, I don't want to wait until that happens.

> I would understand if you didn't have these packages at all, please
> explain the change in policy for these two packages.

This topic came up when discussing putting bits together and another
party raised the issue. I checked the legal status and found that they
are now grayer that they used to be (in Germany), so I was convinced
to let them go.

The situation with libdvdcss is that if interpreted as a copy
prevention measure it is illegal to distribute in Germany (and almost
all of EU) where the master server of ATrpms resides.

With w32codec I only had a mail by the original mplayer author that
all bits included are freely redistributable, but since there is no
accompanying licensing files claiming this and the author is not
anymore involved with mplayer I can't rely on his old mail and need to
play it safe.

> Are these packages available via some other repos?

libdvdcss is certainly still on almost every repo you check, w32codecs
probably not. But especially the latter is just a tarball extraction
from mplayer's ftp site, so it's rather easy to install it even w/o
smart/yum/apt etc.

> Valent.
> 
> On 3/15/07, Axel Thimm <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > the two packages are rather in the gray area of legality. Instead of
> > finding out whether it's OK or not to distribute them, they will be
> > removed from the repo. Both are opt-in packages, which means that they
> > are neither required during building anything else, and if available
> > are used by software at runtime.
> >
> > So either another repo with more brave repo-maintainer will pick that
> > up, or the user will have to build/install it himself. Both packages
> > are rather no-brainers to build/install even for a novice user.

-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net

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