Debian status [LWN.net]

Debian status

Posted Jun 2, 2025 17:27 UTC (Mon) by ju3Ceemi (subscriber, #102464)
Parent article: OpenH264 induces headaches for Fedora

On my Debian:

6.51 [jack:~] apt-cache policy libx264-164
libx264-164:
Installed: 2:0.164.3108+git31e19f9-2+b1
Candidate: 2:0.164.3108+git31e19f9-2+b1
Version table:
*** 2:0.164.3108+git31e19f9-2+b1 500
500 https://deb.debian.org/debian trixie/main amd64 Packages

So the H264 codec is part on the main repository

How is Debian' situation different from Fedora's ?

to post comments

Debian status

Posted Jun 2, 2025 17:40 UTC (Mon) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (5 responses)

How is Debian' situation different from Fedora's ?

The obvious difference is that Fedora is sponsored by a company and it gets legal advice and direction from that company. If Red Hat/IBM's legal folks think something is at a certain level of risk, then Fedora is unlikely to do it/be allowed to do it. Debian is a community run project.

There is a discussion in this bug report that indicates there may have been a decision behind closed doors that the risk was tolerable for Debian. I can't find a *public* decision of this -- which doesn't mean it does not exist, it's possible it was announced somewhere but I have missed it.

Debian status

Posted Jun 2, 2025 19:02 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (4 responses)

Straight from the bug log: Debian patent policy is <https://www.debian.org/legal/patent>

Debian status

Posted Jun 2, 2025 19:46 UTC (Mon) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (3 responses)

That does detail Debian's overall patent policy, but doesn't provide any info about the specific decision to package OpenH264. If anything, it seems to argue against doing so.

Debian status

Posted Jun 2, 2025 20:56 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

I do not think there have been any specific decision to package openH264, this is the whole point of the patent policy, which is basically: do not speak about patent.

Debian status

Posted Jun 2, 2025 23:45 UTC (Mon) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

libx264-164 is not OpenH264, but libx264. The libopenh264-8 library is OpenH264 though.

Debian status

Posted Jun 3, 2025 6:20 UTC (Tue) by Gerardo (subscriber, #37539) [Link]

$ apt-cache search libopenh264
libopenh264-7 - OpenH264 Video Codec
libopenh264-dev - OpenH264 Video Codec - development files
libopenh264-cisco7 - OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco Systems, Inc.
libopenh264-8 - OpenH264 Video Codec
libopenh264-cisco8 - OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco Systems, Inc.

Debian status

Posted Jun 4, 2025 9:17 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (7 responses)

How is Debian' situation different from Fedora's ?

Fedora belongs to Red Hat, which belongs to IBM, which is a big company with deep pockets. Leaving aside the issue of whether it is wise to sue IBM (think “The SCO Group”), people might try even so because there's potentially money to be made.

Debian, OTOH, doesn't belong to a big company and doesn't have that much money of its own, so suing Debian is likely to get you loads of bad PR and not a lot else.

Debian status

Posted Jun 4, 2025 10:33 UTC (Wed) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (6 responses)

So the solution would be to sever the link between fedora and red hat?

Debian status

Posted Jun 4, 2025 11:49 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> So the solution would be to sever the link between fedora and red hat?

The expressions "cutting off the nose to spite the face" and 'throw the baby out with the bathwater" come to mind.

..I've not seen hard numbers but I wouldn't be surprised of RH *directly* spends low-eight-figure sums [0] on Fedora [1], and several times that indirectly [2]. Annually.

Point being, "Severing the link" would effectively be the end of Fedora as we know it.

[0] More than the annual cap of MPEG-LA's licensing regime.
[1] Mostly in the form of salaries, but there's also a sizeable IT (ie equipment+hosting+bandwidth) budget too.
[2] eg folks working on RHEL or Linux itself, virtualization, GCC, GNOME, Freedesktop, and many more upstream projects that make up a substantial chunk of Fedora's new features and use Fedora as their main proving grounds.

Debian status

Posted Jun 5, 2025 9:12 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link] (4 responses)

Less dramatic would be to remove Fedora from the USA. IBM/Red Hat is a global corporation. But IANAL, and I don't know whether that would make it impossible to sue IBM for the activities of a non-US organisation that is bankrolled and to some extent controlled by IBM.

(IBM ought to know already -- I'm pretty certain that they own such subsidiaries).

Debian status

Posted Jun 5, 2025 9:34 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (2 responses)

IBM could do a lot of things but its Linux desktop business is not worth the pain of fighting in court companies that do have a significant desktop business and love patents (ie Apple).

The only solution is to avoid feeding the trolls, refuse to buy things that rely on H264 & H265 (ie iPhone / Apple TV) and replace them with AV1-capable solutions (right now, good Android TV / Android hardware).

The trolls will continue to pile up patents on H 264/ H 265 till it its ecosystem shrinks enough to be unprofitable (and please do not point to the FUD-ing around AV1, it’s only FUD-ing till the patent holders dare suing AOM, which is about as probable as IBM suing H264/H265 holders to invalidate their crap).

Debian status

Posted Jun 5, 2025 9:51 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> The only solution is to avoid feeding the trolls, refuse to buy things that rely on H264 & H265 (ie iPhone / Apple TV) and replace them with AV1-capable solutions (right now, good Android TV / Android hardware).

I wish I could buy stuff that doesn't rely on iCrap OR Android (or anything like that). Unfortunately, it's almost (if not completely) impossible to get a decent "free to air" TV any more, and I'm fed up to the back teeth providing tech support to people who don't have a clue how to navigate the home page. They want the default to be the channel they were last watching, and at most a button for the tv guide.

The in-laws won't be around by then, but I'm dreading what will happen when they get round to shutting down "free to air" - it's currently in the works ...

Cheers,
Wol

Debian status

Posted Jun 5, 2025 10:27 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Unfortunately, when patent trolls are so well funded, and the regulators do not care, there is little alternative to selective buying to make the trolls understand patenting games are not worth the effort. I’d rather give Fedora or Debian money but if you care about video codecs you need to finance the guys that actually deploy commercial alternatives (ie not Apple). The only thing patent trolls will understand is loss of market share.

And the “good” guys are not so good and they also indulge in patenting so you also need to read the spec sheets to make sure their device is actually AV1-oriented.

Debian status

Posted Jun 5, 2025 17:26 UTC (Thu) by rra (subscriber, #99804) [Link]

The US legal system is notorious for believing it has jurisdiction over everyone in the world no matter whether they have real ties to the US. (See, for example, SEC enforcement actions that regularly target non-US companies using the fig leaf that at least one US citizen managed to interact with the company.) It would certainly consider any subsidiary or funded entity of IBM, which trades on US stock exchanges, to be within its jurisdiction regardless of where it had a physical office.

Debian status

Posted Jun 12, 2025 15:06 UTC (Thu) by stefanor (subscriber, #32895) [Link]

> How is Debian' situation different from Fedora's ?

Debian provides an OpenH264 source package that produces 2 separate binary packages:

* libopenh264-8 - this is built from the openh264 source
* libopenh264-cisco8 - this downloads a pre-built binary from Cisco

If you are in a jurisdiction where software patents are recognised, and you have not are not licensed to use h264, you can use the libopenh264-cisco8 package. If you are in a jurisdiction without patent concern, you can use the libopenh264-8 package. This appears to be against Debian's patent policy, I have no insight into the maintainer and FTP masters' decisions there.

Debian is not relying on Fedora to host an APT repository here, instead it is directly downloading the shared library from Cisco (and verifying it against a known hash). So Debian was not relying on any manual request to get Cisco to update a repository.