15 Jan
2006
15 Jan
'06
9:41 p.m.
On Sun, 2006-01-15 at 17:38 -0500, Lee Revell wrote:
On Sun, 2006-01-15 at 23:33 +0100, Cesare Marilungo
wrote:
Damn good point! Unfortunately, with the latest US Supreme Court
ruling on contributory infringement I doubt if any US distro could get
away with this.
--
Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner
The Fuzzy Dice
http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy.html
"As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be
glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and
this we should do freely and generously."
Benjamin Franklin, on declining patents offered by the governor of
Pennsylvania for his "Pennsylvania Fireplace", c. 1744
Maybe it is just because a distro that is shipped
in large quantities
should otherwise pay royalties?
They don't have to ship it, they just have to set up their installer so
it goes on the Net and downloads the MP3 packages from a server in a non
software patent country.
For example (not to beat a dead horse) the distros can't ship the Nvidia
binary driver, as this would violate the GPL (GPL code cannot be linked
with proprietary code) but some have a package where if you "apt-get
install" it, it will go and grab the driver from nvidia's site, compile
the wrapper and link it to the kernel you are running. It's still a GPL
violation, but the individual user is violating the GPL, not the distro.