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Fedora Linux Disabling Mesa's H.264 / H.265 / VC1 VA-API Support Over Legal Concerns

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  • #91
    Originally posted by cooperate View Post
    Can’t they pay royalties to obtain legal rights for h264 and h265 codecs?
    No. The problem is the whole "free software" thing.

    Let's say we do a deal with a patent holder where we say, OK, Fedora has N users, we just need to buy N patent licenses from you, right?

    That doesn't fly, because of F/OSS licensing. One of the key required freedoms is the freedom to be able to redistribute the software. If we only bought a patent license for *you*, the Fedora user, you can't legally exercise that freedom; the software isn't really F/OSS any more.

    The only patent license that actually works for a distributor of F/OSS software is a blanket license that preserves redistribution rights; we pay you a bunch of money and you say, okay, we agree that we've granted a patent license to absolutely anybody who otherwise-legally acquires a copy of the software. Which is something most patent holders are either not willing to do, or not willing to do for any reasonable amount of money.

    Disclaimer: IANAL, this is not legal advice, nor is this an official Red Hat or Fedora communication. This is me on my personal time. All errors and inaccuracies in the above are my own.

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    • #92
      The way this works is really simple, folks. Red Hat kindly allows Fedora to use its extremely high-powered, fully-qualified, expert patent lawyers. If there's an issue like this, we ask them what to do. Then we do what they say.

      It's very black and white. There's no point at which the opinions of people who aren't high-powered, fully qualified expert patent lawyers matter in this process.

      Side notes: no, "Fedora" cannot move out of the US, because "Fedora" actually barely exists, legally speaking. There isn't a Fedora corporation or a Fedora foundation, for various boring reasons. For "Fedora" to move out of the US, Red Hat would have to move out of the US, which is absolutely not going to happen, you can forget about that one.

      SUSE is doing the same thing here, in the end: https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/1006922

      The question of exactly who is responsible for paying the patent license is one of those things you ask your high-powered, fully qualified expert patent lawyers.

      No, this was not done "without prior consulting with the legal team". It was done after consulting with the legal team, because that's what the legal team said to do.

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      • #93
        Originally posted by NobodyXu View Post

        That has nothing to do with US.
        When something is patented, then any use of it without obtaining permission or paying for royalties is crime.
        Yes, anywhere you go it is a crime, because you did not design that stuff, others take their time to do so you have to pay for it.
        No, not "anywhere you go it is a crime", because different places have different laws.

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        • #94
          Originally posted by AdamW View Post
          The way this works is really simple, folks. Red Hat kindly allows Fedora to use its extremely high-powered, fully-qualified, expert patent lawyers. If there's an issue like this, we ask them what to do. Then we do what they say.
          A big part of the problem is that there was not even an attempt at notifying the wider Fedora community that this functionality was being removed. The news only came out because someone noticed it and created a mailing list post asking about this silent change to the mesa build.

          It's really simple folks, Red Hat did not treat the Fedora user community with respect here.

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          • #95
            Originally posted by leigh123linux View Post

            I was thinking about the issue.

            Basically you need to enable h264 & h265 and delete all the existing sub-packages.
            Create a single sub-package called mesa-vaapi-drivers-freeworld.

            Dave has split the vaapi driver into a separate sub-package to make replacement easier.
            * Wed Sep 28 2022 Dave Airlie <[email protected]> 22.2.0-
            - mesa: split out vaapi drivers into separate package

            https://lists.fedoraproject.org/arch...SSIRO5AHNTJCG/

            You build it and delete everything apart from these three files.

            ​
            /usr/lib/dri/nouveau_drv_video.so
            /usr/lib/dri/r600_drv_video.so
            /usr/lib/dri/radeonsi_drv_video.so

            I haven't thought about the replacement method, that's something that can be discussed during the package review.

            ​
            It sounds good. We will check this weekend.

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            • #96
              Originally posted by Space Heater View Post

              A big part of the problem is that there was not even an attempt at notifying the wider Fedora community that this functionality was being removed. The news only came out because someone noticed it and created a mailing list post asking about this silent change to the mesa build.

              It's really simple folks, Red Hat did not treat the Fedora user community with respect here.
              It was a Red Hat employee who noticed it you read the message in the mailing list.

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              • #97
                Originally posted by finalzone View Post

                It was a Red Hat employee who noticed it you read the message in the mailing list.
                If you actually read the post on the mailing list you'd have understood that the person who reported it was not involved with the change process and was surprised by the change. That strongly implies that even other Red Hat employees working on Fedora were not notified of the change let alone non-Red Hat Fedora users.

                I'm impressed by your mental gymnastics to justify the lack of communication by the people who made the change.

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                • #98
                  Originally posted by Mahboi View Post
                  What an odd positionment. Can't they just ignore the problem and wait for someone to actually sue them? It's not as if they're declaring that there is an actual threat, just the possibility of a threat. If we're going there, might as well pass the legal comb on everything and anything you ever do as a company/individual just in case...sounds like a mad policy to me.
                  If your legal department tells you that you are infringing a patent it is because legally you risk losing the case and paying a lot of money and unless it's worth it, no one would.

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                  • #99
                    Originally posted by AdamW View Post
                    No, this was not done "without prior consulting with the legal team". It was done after consulting with the legal team, because that's what the legal team said to do.
                    Then why didn't Airlie say it right away? What made people angry was this being done for the possibility of being sued with nothing to back it up. At no moment did he say the legal team ordered him to disable it, and the implication that this could be the case only surfaced several messages later. The openSUSE commit you linked explicitly said their legal team told them to disable the encumbered codecs.

                    Again, this could have been handled better. If MPEG-LA had no intent to sue, mentioning them in a commit message will no doubt get their attention.

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                    • Originally posted by Space Heater View Post

                      If you actually read the post on the mailing list you'd have understood that the person who reported it was not involved with the change process and was surprised by the change. That strongly implies that even other Red Hat employees working on Fedora were not notified of the change let alone non-Red Hat Fedora users.

                      I'm impressed by your mental gymnastics to justify the lack of communication by the people who made the change.
                      Same way by your attempt at putting a blame to a company as a whole rather to the mesa maintainer who took responsibility of his action realizing a legal oversight. Reread your previous post to see why I replied.

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