[Bf-committers] A question about blenders use of ffmpeg and grey area codecs

[Dave Plater lst]

On 03/17/2012 01:09 AM, Campbell Barton wrote:
> Do you have a link to the patches you're applying to blender?
>
> On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 9:18 PM, Dave Plater lst<dplater.list at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> I'm getting really tired of having to continually patch blender releases to pass the openSUSE / Novell legal review. I'm led to believe
>> that if a program doesn't link against a patent or copyright challenged library then it isn't in danger of legal action. You can understand
>> a company like Novell being a target for such legal action.
>> What I would like to know is what are the functions of the various xvid and ffmpeg sources/scripts. The python ones that I've glanced at
>> seem to have the purpose of supplying parameters to ffmpeg.
Which is not a legal problem, this is similar to what for example kde's kaffeine does with codecs.
>> I'm then going to pass this information to the legal department for clarification on whether I really have to remove these bits and patch
>> blender to build without them or not.
>>
>> Thanks
>> Dave Plater
>> Maintainer Blender in
>> openSUSE
>>
>>
Sorry about late reply, see :
https://build.opensuse.org/package/files?package=blender&project=graphics gets you to the sources. I'm using packman to get blender-2.62 
building without the patches and with ffmpeg until I can resolve this problem. The patch is called 
blender-2.55-blenkernel.patch<https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file?file=blender-2.55-blenkernel.patch&package=blender&project=graphics&rev=4cf50476d87ce6e14770496f77be9bb8> 
and it's needed due to the removals that take place at the end of the section marked "%prep.
The some of the other patches are left over from the python 3.1 days and will be removed. There's a brief comment above each "Patch..: 
field in the beginning of the spec file and blender.changes should have record of where each one came from.
I simply need expert explanation to pass to the legal department that the functions bearing the names with mpeg and xvid in them are simply 
for using codecs and are not hidden segments of code from the patent and copyright challenged sources. I'm actually surprised that I 
haven't crippled blender yet but the amount of requests when I'm late with an update indicate there are a few openSUSE users., On a 
different subject, I saw that 2.62 fully supports "second life" now which shall make one of said users very happy.

Thanks
Dave