RFC: On-demand package installation API in kdelibs

[Martin Sandsmark]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 09:16:48PM +0200, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> On Wednesday 28 of July 2010, Martin Sandsmark wrote:
> > On Wednesday 28 July 2010 17:58:57 Lubos Lunak wrote:
> > > - Amarok will complain about MP3 support not being present (which is the
> > > case by default with some distributions because of legal reasons) and will
> > > try running a specific script to install it
> >
> > Won't this move liability over to KDE?
> > Helping/asking people to break various laws (DMCA in the case of libdvdcss,
> > patent laws, etc.) is not something I want to do. :-)
> 
>  I'm not a lawyer, so I can't tell for sure (and Amarok already has support 
> for it now, just not as a generic KDE functionality).

Yes, Amarok already has it, and GNOME already has it, but that doesn't mean
they can't be targeted in a future lawsuit.

>  I think KDE should not be responsible, because this should not work on its 
> own, without the packager helping it a bit. If Amarok finds out it cannot 
> play mp3, it would just do 'installCapability( "amarok-mp3" )' and that'd be 
> it, it would be just saying there is something missing, but vanilla KDE 
> wouldn't do anything about it. It would be up to the code provided by the 
> packager to make this call actually install something. Even if there would be 
> one day a generic upstream code to install a package, it would be up to the 
> packager to provide a package that provides "amarok-mp3".

But this is all technicalities, and AFAIK laws usually care about intents. If
it is our intent to help/recommend people break the law, then we can be held
responsible for that (even if the technical implementation is distro
specific), or?

I'm not a lawyer either, though. Maybe we should mail the Software Freedom
Law Center or something and ask?

-- 
Martin Sandsmark 
:wq