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List:       fedora-devel-list
Subject:    Re: OpenSSL and ECC patents (was Re: Mesa in F37- vaapi support disabled for h264/h265/vc1)
From:       Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour () gmail ! com>
Date:       2022-09-28 15:20:53
Message-ID: 2d19b29c-db85-c387-904b-b67986e4f89e () gmail ! com
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On 9/28/22 08:21, Neal Gompa wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2022 at 1:15 PM Michael J Gruber <mjg@fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> > 
> > As Fedora users and contributors, we profit a lot from everything that RedHat \
> > provides to the Fedora project, be it infra, people-power or "leverage" (talking \
> > to vendors etc.). In turn, RedHat can expect a certain amount of understanding \
> > from "us" for their business interests, which include legal liabilities, of \
> > course. 
> > Understanding is helped greatly by communication, though. Legal answers such as \
> > "We can not" do not further this understanding, and "We can not and we can not \
> > tell you why" is not much better, but these are the typical answer we get, not \
> > even with a "sorry, but we can't". Obviously, these legal questions are difficult \
> > to explain, but it can't be true that each such case is under a "gag order". This \
> > non-transparency is orthogonal to our first F and hurts all efforts to increase \
> > the number of contributors. 
> > Now, I don't expect the communication issue to be resolved any time soon. \
> > Therefore it's important to work on the other major friction point: How difficult \
> > do we make it for users/contributors to get the missing bits that they need or \
> > can (because they are no distributors, in a different jurisdiction etc.)? 
> > rpmfusion/gstreamer is a prime example of how things can work flawlessly, and \
> > takes into account all interests. 
> > ffmpeg is a prime example of "in your face", of course, and I'm happy to read \
> > that it may get resolved. 
> 
> Let's talk for a moment here about this. I'm going to give you some
> "inside baseball" (or at least as much as I can). I can tell you up
> front that ffmpeg in Fedora is *entirely* my fault.
> 
> I spent many years tirelessly trying to come up with a solution to
> bring FFmpeg into Fedora. It started from the moment we got approval
> to introduce MPEG1 and MPEG2 codecs into Fedora. I cannot overstate
> how much back-and-forth with Red Hat Legal it took to figure it out.
> Over the last few years, more and more codecs got gradually approved,
> until we got to a point that enough codecs were approved that it made
> sense to finally produce a package to introduce. I had been trying to
> come up with a stripped FFmpeg source tree to deliver and was not
> succeeding until Andreas Scheider came up with the scripts to do it
> properly. That breakthrough allowed us to bring FFmpeg into Fedora as
> ffmpeg-free.
> 
> It was my choice to be quiet about its introduction, because I was
> being verbally and emotionally abused by other community members over
> it and I didn't want to invite more by making a big announcement like
> we did for mp3. At one point, I got so stressed over it that I became
> physically ill for weeks.
> 
> Do I regret this work? No. I still firmly believe this is going to
> improve the usefulness of baseline Fedora and expand the pressure to
> improve and prioritize Free Software in the Linux space. Do I want to
> do something like this again? I don't know. It really sucked and in
> the end all I got was hate for it. I want to make Fedora the best
> Linux distribution out there, but I also don't want to create a
> situation where all Fedora users and contributors are in legal
> jeopardy.
> 
> > The other big issue are our hobbled sources: We cannot store some original \
> > sources in the look-aside cache, obviously. But packages such as openssl do not \
> > even specify a hash nor an url for the un-hobbled sources. This makes it \
> > unncessarily difficult to verify that our openssl package has indeed been built \
> > against against the hobbled version of the original sources - for a package like \
> > openssl this really is a trust issue (and might even violate our packaging \
> > guidelines, but I'm not a lawyer...). 
> 
> I'm (personally, though IANAL) of the opinion that the hobbling of
> crypto libraries is probably no longer necessary and can be retired
> entirely. The method of producing the stripped sources is
> reproducible, so from our guidelines perspective, it's fine. But I do
> think it's probably obsolete, and I hope Red Hat Legal concurs.
> 
> > As a side effect, it makes it unnecesarily difficult to rebuild the package \
> > locally (though it does not effectively inhibit it either, of course; it is not \
> > an "effective measure" for that cause). I do understand that providing a \
> > functional link can be construed to be "redistribution", but in the context of a \
> > spec file, a comment really is a reference to the "source of the source", without \
> > which we cannot even claim to distribute the hobbled version legally (and without \
> > which we have no trust chain). 
> > Note that depending on the legal outcome mesa might have to go the hobbled route, \
> > too: simply disabling the codecs in %build does not change anything about \
> > redistributing the source.
> 
> That will depend on how much codec detail exists in the Mesa codebase.
> I would guess not enough to matter, but IANAL.
> 
> Here's something of a drop-kick for you though: those
> hardware-accelerated codecs that Dave Airlie disabled from Mesa
> weren't being used by *anything* in Fedora anyway. Not GStreamer, not
> FFmpeg, not Chromium, etc. We've been extremely careful to ensure we
> don't provide a "completed puzzle" as it were for those codecs. In
> practice, you are getting *nothing* from those codecs anyway. Fedora
> has only provided working hardware acceleration for unencumbered
> codecs. That list is expanding all the time, but for now this means
> you're basically only going to see MPEG1, MPEG2, VP8, VP9, and AV1
> acceleration. Everything else is currently off the table.

Could Cisco somehow be convinced to provide hardware acceleration as
part of OpenH264?
-- 
Sincerely,
Demi Marie Obenour (she/her/hers)
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