Talk:Fraunhofer FDK AAC

Non-free status

The license included with the source code, NOTICE, seems to be very liberal, but the software is non-free for at least the following reasons.

The text itself first allows any distribution in source or binary form, but later restricts such distribution to purposes authorized by patent licenses:

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted without payment of copyright license fees [with restrictions]...

— FDK License

NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED LICENSES TO ANY PATENT CLAIMS ... ARE GRANTED BY THIS SOFTWARE LICENSE. ... You may use this ... software or modifications thereto only for purposes that are authorized by appropriate patent licenses.

— FDK License

Debian considers it non-free [1]:

You may not charge copyright license fees for anyone to use, copy or distribute the FDK AAC Codec software or your modifications thereto.

— FDK License

6: No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

— Debian Free Software Guidelines

--Bp0 (talk) 18:45, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Open-source?

Arguably, the library is not "open-source" according to the commonly accepted definition — acceptance (or at least likelihood of acceptance) of the license by OSI. In particular, the following lines (43-44) of the license would not be acceptable:

   You may not charge copyright license fees for anyone to use, copy or distribute the FDK AAC Codec
   software or your modifications thereto.

It might be better to describe it as "source available".

Gephyra (talk) 20:03, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Debian consider(ed|s) it non-free, for the reasons I stated earlier, but Fedora/Red Hat considers it free, and apparently so does the FSF. According to the section you've linked, source available means that the shared code can not be legally modified or distributed, but that is not the case with FDK AAC. It may be modified and distributed, the only restriction is that rights to license patented technology are not granted by the source code being made available. As I understand it, the SBR part of HE-AAC is covered by patents, so the idea was for Fedora to ship a version of library with only support for AAC-LC, and to have a full version, with HE-AAC support, available from a repository for people who live in places where software patents are not a thing, "freeworld". [2] --bp0 (talk) 13:28, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

Sorry for the extremely late reply, as this somehow fell off my radar. I've removed the sentence:

Fedora's license information page claims that the Free Software Foundation also considers it free.

as it's misleading, even if technically true. Fedora's Good Licenses table does indeed have a "Yes" in the "FSF Free?" column for the "Fraunhofer FDK AAC License". The relevant line was added on 10 October 2017 (changelog), by "Spot". However, on the RH bugzilla thread, the same person (Tom "spot" Callaway) wrote on 12 October 2017 (two days later), that:

We consider the license on this package to be Free. We haven't reached out to the FSF for an opinion on compatibility.

Hence, the line in the table must have been added erroneously (or possibly they use "FSF Free" in the sense "free/libre" to distinguish it from "free/gratis", rather than in the sense of specifically accepted by the FSF). Later on in the thread, it's reported that they did eventually reach out to the FSF, but there has been no further update on whether the FSF has replied yet (the FSF has a backlog), so I don't think the article should be making any statements on the FSF's position. (Particularly since the FSF's license list does not mention it.) --Gephyra (talk) 09:30, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

References