[gNewSense-users] Re: VLC is non free?

[Danny Clark]

Benjamin Webb wrote:
> 2008/8/4 Ivan Ivanov <address@hidden>:
>> Hi!
>>
>> I needed to download vlc today, and I have seen, that vlc is in the
>> multiverse repository of Ubuntu. But VLC is under GPL2 or layter, so
>> the software itself has no licenses problems.
>>
>> Probably is that some kind of software patent issue? If so, than I have
>> no problem with it, because software patents aren't valid in Europe.

I don't think that's completely clear (to anyone, including lawyers).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_European_Patent_Convention#Relevant_decisions
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/03/08/softwarepatents.html

>> Can someone explain me, am I right?
> 
> Yes, it's patent issues. I've had the same problem as you, so I
> created my own repo with the free stuff from multiverse. It's called
> multistanza - http://freedomdreams.co.uk/wiki/Multistanza . I would be
> interested as to what people on the gnewsense team think of this idea.

If the idea is to maintain things that are in Ubuntu multiverse but
recompiled to support the philosophy of gNewSense, then that would make
a lot of sense to me - specifically it looks like vlc can be compiled
without mp3 support or support for other non-free codecs pretty easily.