Royalty free gstreamer plug-in

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 12/23/05, Patrick Barnes <nman64 at n-man.com> wrote:
> By "the patent situation", I mean that MP3 is covered by patents, and
> that to use or redistribute any technology that takes advantage of a
> patented technique, you must obtain a license from the patent holder.

Assuming this statement about requiring generally requiring a contract
for patent encombered sourcecode is true and the statement that Fedora
doesn't contract for patents is also true.. can you explain why the
freetype package that ships in Core includes the source code for the
patented byte interpreter?   You know the bytecode intepreter that can
be re-enabled with a simple rebuild of freetype src.rpm by switching a
predefined specfile macro  %define without_bytecode_interpreter from 0
to 1?

I honestly can't reconcile either claim you make about the general
situation in a way the explains why freetype is shipped in fedora the
way that it is.

-jef