Moodbar in Amarok 2.0?

[Jeff Mitchell]

Ian Monroe wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 7:47 AM, Soren Harward <stharward at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 8:30 AM, Daniel Winter <dw at danielwinter.de> wrote:
>>> And what relevance has that patent in the rest of the world? Europe, china and
>>> so on? (well I am not a lawyer so I do not know)
>> Look, I dislike US software patents as much as everybody else in the
>> FOSS world, but the fact stands that in at least some part of the
>> world (which is home to a large number of Amarok users) that code is
>> not going to be usable.  It might not even be permissible to store the
>> code on servers located in the USA.  These are both significant, but
>> not insurmountable, barriers to development and distribution.
>>
>> If someone outside the US would like to take on maintaining the
>> moodbar, I don't think any of the Amarok developers would mind.  But
>> all I hear right now are inquiries about its status (or complaints
>> that it hasn't been ported), so I'm being a little pessimistic that
>> given the patent problem, I doubt that it will get picked up any time
>> soon.
> 
> Remember that patents aren't like copyright at all; violating them is
> never criminal. You only have to worry about patents if you have
> enough money to be worth suing. Most companies get a bunch of patents
> really as protection: the big companies rarely sue over patent
> infringement since then the suing would never stop as everyone is
> violating each other software patents.
> 
> We don't have money, so we don't worry. And unless Soren your a
> billionare, you shouldn't really worry either.
> 
> Overall I think its best if we remain ignorant of patents and I'd
> appreciate if you didn't bring up patent numbers in the future.

I don't think this is the right attitude.

Even if you don't care about patents, many distros do.  I'd rather not
have Amarok relegated to the "non-free" repositories or lacking any
official packages in Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/etc. because we willfully
infringed a patent we knew about.  We may not have money, but Canonical
and Red Hat sure do.

That's why I proposed that if the work is carried out it is done in a
way that can be separated from Amarok, similarly to MP3 support.