Re: Patent nonsense: zstd

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <address@hidden> skribis:

> [...and now CC'ing the list because mail is hard.]
>
> Leo,
>
> On 05/11/16 19:56, Leo Famulari wrote:
>> My 2¢ are quoted from the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines
>> [0], which Guix does follow:
>>
>> [...] they're often worded so as to make it hard to tell what they
>> do or don't cover, [...]
>
> I got the same vibes from the answers in that GitHub thread[0]. I'm
> easily suspicious.
>
>> [...] On the other hand, we also don't object if a distributor
>> chooses to omit some software in order to avoid patent risk.
>
> This is (partly) what prompted me to write to guix-devel in the first
> place: I wasn't sure if the Guix maintainers have their own opinions on
> the matter.

I’d follow the FSDG’s wisdom here and include it in the distro (also I
live in the EU where such patents are supposedly not applicable).

That said, I would not recommend its use.

Ludo’.