Re: Gnash Considered Non-Free by Gobuntu?

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

DC Parris <dcparris@carolina.rr.com> writes:
> Is he assuming patent infringement?

I don't know what he's assuming :)

>  Is it a good idea to
> consider 'possible' or 'allegedly' infringing code to be 'non-Free' without
> some sort of proof positive?

No.

> I find the Mono submission to be slightly less puzzling,

I agree.  The Mono situation is different because Microsoft have claimed
they have relevent patents and have also declared themselves as an enemy of
free software.

(And we can't trust the company that developes Mono to protect the free
software community against Microsoft.)

> and don't know
> enough about the Samba project to comment on how well they vet their code. 

The Samba folks are very aware of legal issues.  They've been working with
FSFE (where I work) on the EU anti-trust case, and this requires a lot of
legal care.

> On the other hand, I believe Gnash is an official GNU project, and am
> assuming that GNU has implemented the same checks it normally does.

The GNU project is also very strict about legal issues.  For example, GNU's
cryptographic software, such as GnuPG and GnuTLS, is developed outside of
the USA.

Similarly with Gnash, the developer (Rob Savoye)'s company will only hires
people in the USA if they have never installed or used Adobes flash player
(which means, IIRC, they mostly hire Europeans instead).  IIRC, they also
don't do any reverse engineering.  The developers (anywhere in the world)
don't have Adobe's software installed, they just examine flash files.

So I think Gnash is quite safe.

-- 
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