fdk-aac: who knows more?

[Romain Beauxis]

Been reading the license. It's nice to point out explicit terms that
are deemed non-free to back-up any claim, otherwise it sounds like
FUD..

The part of the license that does not seem DFSG-compliant to me is this one:

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

This indeed appears to contradict DSFG #6:

---
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.
---

HOWEVER, I am not sure what the term "COPYRIGHT LICENSE" exactly
means. I would like to know if someone else could shed more light on
this expression, perhaps with some german legal background as I
suspect it to be the litteral translation by the Fraunhofer institute
of some german legal notion.

If one thinks of the Android case where this code was extracted from,
this part of the license seems to mean that it is possible to
distribute and charge for a software that incorporates the encoder in
binary form _but_ that free access to the source code, without a
"copyright license fee", must be provided, which is what Android is
doing and the reason this code has been released to begin with.

If that is indeed the meaning of the license, then this would pretty
much be equivalent to the GPL requirements on modification and access
to the source code and so I would not see any other reason to consider
this license non-free.

Anyone?

Romain

2012/9/3 Fabian Greffrath <fabian at greffrath.com>:
> Am 02.08.2012 10:04, schrieb Fabian Greffrath:
>
>> Is fdk-aac finally the first *free* high-quality AAC encoder or is it
>> just the next *non-free* one after FAAC?
>
>
> Nobody?
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> pkg-multimedia-maintainers mailing list
> pkg-multimedia-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org
> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pkg-multimedia-maintainers