The issue of software licence requirements for these video codecs has been subject of many news items on Phoronix and discussions within RedHat/Fedora community for a few years
Fedora developer created a push request in April that summarises the dilemma for distribution packagers and developers
meson: add a video codec support option (!15258) · Merge requests · Mesa / mesa · GitLab
The issue is you only get on the patent radar once you can actually decode something out of the box, if it doesn’t work nobody cares what you ship in the parts.
The push request links back to an article that explains further:
TL:DR
If these codecs continue to be released in ready-to-use form, Manjaro would be liable to pay licence fees. The only exemption for a licence fee is if users build the software from source
I expect that the decision to drop the codecs from the package was made by Manjaro Team maintaining packages and Manjaro Gmbh was not consulted about paying any licence fee because they knew that would be just as controversial
(eg r/troll meme could be: manjaro misuses funds to buy proprietary software)
How much would it actually cost for Manjaro to licence these codecs for legal redistribution?
Fedora/RedHat/IBM favoured dropping the codecs instead of paying for licencing. If it was expensive enough to make them to fold out of the game Manjaro probably couldn’t afford to buy into it
The only recent evidence I can find about Arch/Manjaro being aware of this licence issue is the Arch bug report that was closed as fixed
FS#74615 : [mesa] mesa 22.2+ requires changes for HW accelaration
And the Arch-like distributions were no better at being forward looking as far as I can see. Discussion in other fora only started end of September.
Manjaro does not have a legal department or technical research department so all users are responsible for reporting any concerns about packages
In this case, nobody noticed the significance until recently
IMO scapegoating someone else for failure of due diligence by everyone is lame and irrelevant
and doubly so for anyone who needed support for devices
comments that Manjaro is not at risk under intellectual copyright due to being outside US jurisdiction
is only part of the problem.
The lawyers could use Universal Code of Commerce to claim non payment on a contract, there are only a few places on the planet outside that jurisdiction that I know of and no sensible options for a Manjaro mirror (sealand is too expensive and unreliable for hosting anything)
I don’t have any idea what the terms and conditions Manjaro Gmbh directors could be required to comply with, but I know how UK company directors can be disqualified for lack of feduciary responsibilty
Directors have to at least look like responsible, law abiding citizens in public life
The best current solution is to get the package from Arch
A better solution in the near future (when all the fuss dies down) would be for someone with no obvious affiliation or history with Manjaro Team to create a third-party site with the source code and good instructions on how to build it
TL:DR2:
The only way to avoid any licencing costs and legal problems is to build it from source
I can agree that this is not consistent with the simplicity I would expect from Manjaro
But I don’t see any better way forward at the moment
And the times they are a changin’ very rapidly these days so circumstances could be very different in 2023