[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Ogg legal issues?

[From: Raphaël Quinet]

On Fri, 05 Aug 2005 15:34:26 +0300, Salonen Kuisma <kuisma.salonen at maemo.org> wrote:
> Ok this statement was not fully considered. I am not aware of ongoing 
> legal activities inside Nokia and the legal issue assumption was about 
> Thomson / Fraunhofer statements about ogg violating their patents. But 
> again, that was just my personal assumption and I am not lawyer, neither 
> I know about ongoing legal activities.

As far as I know, xiph.org has been very careful about patents and the
Ogg format and Vorbis codec are generally considered to be "safe".

However, there may be an issue with the BSD-like license used for the
ogg/vorbis libraries provided by xiph.org: this is the old BSD license
with the "obnoxious advertising clause":
  "Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
   documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution."
This means that the docs of the 770 would have to include that notice.
This may also be a problem when (statically) linking with GPL code.  See
also: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#OriginalBSD

-Raphaël