What are consequences of "merger necessitates removal of ... packages due to licensing issues"

Mon Sep 22 18:02:11 UTC 2003

On Mon, Sep 22, 2003 at 01:45:48PM -0400, Sean Estabrooks wrote:
> IANAL either and maybe that's why i didn't understand much of what you
> said.   The Fedora Project and RedHat _merged_, what is it exactly that
> RedHat must keep an arms length relationship to?   Itself?

Code that has legal "issues" -- DMCA (DeCSS), software patents
(MP3, MPEG-4, etc.), copyright violations (fonts, binary codecs, etc.).

One case that particularly irks me is Valgrind, which is apparently a
software patent minefield. (See Bugzilla.)  It would be nice to have
a list of applicable patents, and see whether IBM, now that it owns
Rational, can grant some sort of patent cover for it (and qemu?); HP
(via Compaq, via DEC) may also hold some applicable patents.

	Bill Rugolsky