Debian status [LWN.net]

Debian status

Posted Jun 2, 2025 17:40 UTC (Mon) by jzb (editor, #7867)
In reply to: Debian status by ju3Ceemi
Parent article: OpenH264 induces headaches for Fedora

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.

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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.