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Comment by Flimm | Hacker News Reader

This is the first article of the policy:

> Debian will not knowingly distribute software encumbered by patents; Debian contributors should not package or distribute software they know to infringe a patent.

That seems a bit too vague for me. Would free software like Mono, VLC or ffmpeg fall under this category? Many people would say that they are patent encumbered, (and of course, many would say the opposite).

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Have you ever used Debian? It already doesn't distribute many codecs for precisely this reason.

Currently, Debian does distribute Mono, VLC and ffmpeg, I'm not aware of the codecs you speak of.

(Oh, and I do use Debian, five days a week, but I don't see how that's relevant to my question.)

They didn't - last I knew - distribute LAME or other MP3 encoders. I think the patent enforcement situation has changed since that call was originally made, but earlier (late 90's, early 2000's), the patent owners were enforcing patents for encoders but not decoders.

It is a version of Firefox with the branding removed as that portion has a copyright by Mozilla. This project started in 2004-2005.

I actually thought the policy in the original post has always been Debian's policy.

Mozilla has trademark rights over the Firefox name and logo, and they license the logo's image file under a proprietary copyright license. It has nothing to do with patents, so the new policy does not affect that issue at all.

Isn't this one reason for the existence of http://debian-multimedia.org ?

Have you used it recently?

You can taint your install with pretty much anything.

I have access to more firmwares blobs than with Ubuntu.

What's "known" - are they going to keep track of it somehow?

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