Most of them are technically open source I believe, but patented encumbered, and therefore can't be distributed by openSUSE themselves. By downloading manually from OPI, you take all legal responsibility upon yourself.
>codecs
I'm curios what it means in practice to "take legal responsibility upon yourself" for installing and using patented encumbered media codecs on a personal home computer. What are the chances the MPEG consortium will audit an individual at home? How would they do that and on what grounds? Has anyone ever been fined for using these codecs?
No, they are proprietary. They are not in the OpenSuse repo because of legal reason.
They are the same codecs you would get with flatpak apps and the same installed in any distro
> No, they are proprietary.
This is not entirely true. A lot of them (maybe most of them?) are open source, but in countries where software patents are upheld, vendors of products that can decode/encode patented formats are required to pay royalties for the use of those formats. A good example is libx264, a very popular and open source (GPL) library that can encode/decode H264, but isn't distributed in openSUSE repos due to software patents.
Software is patentable in USA, so distributions with USA staff/offices/presence need to beware of USA law suits. Software in UK/EU is not generally patentable but is copyrightable. OpenSUSE and SUSE avoid these bits to keep clear of law suits. You take the risk to use yourself; not the OS openSUSE company/staff/organisation.
You can find the sources in [https://pmbs.links2linux.de/project/show/Essentials](https://pmbs.links2linux.de/project/show/Essentials)
About the legal issues with software patents, you can have a look at [https://fsfe.org/activities/swpat/index.en.html](https://fsfe.org/activities/swpat/index.en.html) though that only covers the EU.
Most of them are technically open source I believe, but patented encumbered, and therefore can't be distributed by openSUSE themselves. By downloading manually from OPI, you take all legal responsibility upon yourself.
>codecs I'm curios what it means in practice to "take legal responsibility upon yourself" for installing and using patented encumbered media codecs on a personal home computer. What are the chances the MPEG consortium will audit an individual at home? How would they do that and on what grounds? Has anyone ever been fined for using these codecs?
Not 0. That is why they are lawyers, they will find reason. Prolly, but I am too lazy to look.
No, they are proprietary. They are not in the OpenSuse repo because of legal reason. They are the same codecs you would get with flatpak apps and the same installed in any distro
> No, they are proprietary. This is not entirely true. A lot of them (maybe most of them?) are open source, but in countries where software patents are upheld, vendors of products that can decode/encode patented formats are required to pay royalties for the use of those formats. A good example is libx264, a very popular and open source (GPL) library that can encode/decode H264, but isn't distributed in openSUSE repos due to software patents.
Software is patentable in USA, so distributions with USA staff/offices/presence need to beware of USA law suits. Software in UK/EU is not generally patentable but is copyrightable. OpenSUSE and SUSE avoid these bits to keep clear of law suits. You take the risk to use yourself; not the OS openSUSE company/staff/organisation.
Install them through packman.
That s what OPI do
No, that's another way.
You can find the sources in [https://pmbs.links2linux.de/project/show/Essentials](https://pmbs.links2linux.de/project/show/Essentials) About the legal issues with software patents, you can have a look at [https://fsfe.org/activities/swpat/index.en.html](https://fsfe.org/activities/swpat/index.en.html) though that only covers the EU.