legal issues on media codecs (was Re: very rough pre-gep tentative new modules list)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Luis Villa <louie ximian com> writes: 
> More generally, though, and completely tegardless of the exact set of
> pieces not available, the legal codec issue is a problem that at some
> point GNOME[1] must deal with- if we're ever going to compete with XP
> and OS/X instead of win95 and OS9, we[2]'re going to need mp3, dvd, wma,
> etc. support. Which means either figuring out a debian-style tiered
> mirror system, or biting the bullet and fighting it legally. This may
> not be something we're capable of tackling in a 2.2 timeframe, which
> /might/ be a reason to punt xine and totem from Desktop for now. But
> that's clearly something we need to discuss.
>

A possible answer is to have a pluggable media system, where various
codecs can be dropped in, and ship only unencumbered codecs such as
ogg ourselves. If the plugin system is compatible with non-GPL plugins
(say an X/BSD-style license plugin), then people could license the mp3
patent and then include an mp3 plugin, for example, at some point in
the future.  If the plugin system requires plugins to be GPL, then
patent licenses are impossible - which may be a policy decision we
want to make, but I'm not sure it makes sense. Or another alternative
might be to allow GPL only but have an exception for codec patent
licenses.

Havoc