Policy on BUILD_PATENTED

[Sam Kuper]

On Sun, Aug 09, 2020 at 10:55:37AM +0100, Sam Kuper wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 03, 2020 at 07:11:13PM +0300, Etienne Champetier wrote:
>> Le lun. 3 août 2020 à 00:04, Rosen Penev a écrit :
>>> 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?
> 
> For OpenWRT at least, might Debian be a more appropriate exemplar than
> Fedora?  Unlike Fedora AFAIK, but like OpenWRT, Debian is represented
> in some sense by SPI: https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/debian/ .
> 
> The debian-legal mailing list archives can be searched for the
> decisions taken by the debian-legal team, and the reasoning behind
> those decisions: https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/ .

Here is an example of discussion on that list, that is on a similar
topic to the original question in this thread: patent-encumbered
software.  It also speaks to differences between the Debian and Red Hat
policies.

(The example is 15 years old, so perhaps not representative of current
policy.  I'm just giving it as an example.)

    [The] reason Debian continues to include the mp3 decoder library is
    that this patent, like so many other software patents, does not
    appear to be actively enforced.  This is the standard Debian uses in
    deciding whether to distribute the software; Red Hat evidently uses
    a different standard.

    Source: https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/07/msg00082.html

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