Enabling and installing of "risky" ("patented") codecs - made easy

[Loïc Minier]

 I share your feelings; I think it would be useful for our users to
 improve this situation and handle it cleanly and officially instead of
 allowing the use of sometimes poor third party repos.  Our users waste
 too much time and efforts on such things.

 I think our goal should be to make it very easy to get binaries in the
 end, which then can be automated by some GUI tool / hooks.


 There are many technical / organizational problems to solve; I think
 hosting the source and hosting the binaries are two things with
 different requirements, but we might skip this distinction in the
 initial efforts.  Different sources / binaries might also have various
 problem types:
 - infringement on actively enforced patent (where are the patents
   enforced/enforceable, hence country specific)
 - copyright laws infringements (country specific)
 - is source redistribution allowed while binary distribution isn't?
   (depends on the country as well)

 These might be issues for source packages or for binary packages, or
 for the act of distribution, the act of download, or the act of using
 the software.

 So perhaps there is a simple enough intersection of all constraints
 which might allow setting up a limited archive in a permissive country,
 but perhaps we should think at advanced long term solutions which would
 allow:
 - distinguishing packages issues
 - selecting potential hosting countries
 - selecting allowed download countries
 - selecting the proper mechanism to obtain a binary (perhaps building
   from source in some cases)

 Ultimately, we might have to:
 - decorate our source packages with classification information (for
   example X-NotAutoBuildable, which might be useful for non-free, but I
   digress)
 - decorate our mirrors (and lists thereof) with availability
   information
 - handle new types of data describing law allowances
 - build software to make this all "simply work"

 The new copyright file format might allow for new extensions such as
 documenting whether this or that source is know on $date to infringe on
 an actively enforced patent in $country for (source|binary)
 (distribution|use|download) etc.

 But then while I'm ready to offer ideas on the above, I'm afraid this
 is a huge task to actually achieve...

   Bye,
-- 
Loïc Minier