On Mon, Feb 01, 1999 at 10:14:38PM +0100, Josip Rodin wrote: > > I don't see why we ought to let some lawyers trying to make a good bluff > > scare us. > > Fraunhofer institute holds the patent, we shouldn't take any chances.
The fact that they hold *a* patent does not put Debian in any sort of jeopardy. If anything, it would be the authors; Debian is complying with GPL completely. > They have already treathened to sue or sued several people who used > their encoder engine - let's hope that they won't get to the decoders. Threatened. Not sued. I have yet to see any evidence that they have a patent applicable to decoders. > Debian has been very paranoid to the vague licencing terms of some > progs in the past, from what I've seen. The licensing terms are not vague: it's GPL. That's about as solid as you can get. > But that is not the reason why my first guess was non-free. It was > the fact that mpg123 is in non-free, and x11amp is (according to > the docs) based on it. mpg123 is in non-free because of its license. I did not find any documentation anywhere that indicated that x11amp uses any mpg123 code. (Where are you looking?) Since it's released as GPL, it's free.
