Ubuntu – Is it legal to install msttcorefonts package? Is Wine legal

MP3 Legal Issues

http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Lame_Installation#Legal_issues

• While the LAME source code is free, the encoding technology that ready-compiled LAME binaries use is patented. The patents are held by Fraunhofer and administered by Thomson. Patenting raises a theoretical possibility that in some countries a user might need to pay a licence fee to legally encode MP3s. This might vary according to the purpose of the encoding and whether the software being used is licensed. There is no definitive list of countries where the patents unambiguously hold sway. However they are generally assumed to be enforceable in USA, Canada, the EEC and Japan. This means that in these countries (in theory), software that encodes MP3s must be licensed by the patent holders, and that anyone encoding MP3s with unlicensed encoders may also be infringing patents.

The best advice that can be given is that the user makes their own decision, based on their conscience, the country they are in, and taking into account the following:

• The patent holders have tended to enforce licence fees against commercial rather than free MP3 encoders
• Thomson themselves have said that no license is needed by individuals creating music libraries of MP3 files for personal use (interpretations vary whether that sanctions using unlicensed encoders, free or otherwise)
• MP3 patents will expire worldwide between 2010 and 2012.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3

• In September 1998, the Fraunhofer Institute sent a letter to several developers of MP3 software stating that a license was required to "distribute and/or sell decoders and/or encoders". The letter claimed that unlicensed products "infringe the patent rights of Fraunhofer and Thomson. To make, sell and/or distribute products using the [MPEG Layer-3] standard and thus our patents, you need to obtain a license under these patents from us." The various MP3-related patents expire on dates ranging from 2007 to 2017 in the U.S. MP3 license revenues generated about €100 million for the Fraunhofer Society in 2005.

• The group that holds the patent on MP3's demands that for each player with MP3 support a 75 cent fee must be paid:

http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html

• However, no license is needed for private, non-commercial activities (e.g., home-entertainment),receiving broadcasts and creating a personal music library), not generating revenue or other consideration of any kind or for entities with associated gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00.

http://www.mp3licensing.com/help/#5

While you can legally distribute and use the MP3 format, the content of these files is what gets you "in trouble" i.e. you can't distribute Copyrighted Content such as Songs and make profit but of course you can use (listen to) them.

• Mp3 of course is open for all end-user applications (that is, we
  don't license end-users).

http://www.mp3licensing.com/

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CDRipping

• If you live in a country where it is legal to use this format, to encode MP3s, you can use Sound Juicer which uses gstreamer and the LAME mp3 encoder. The following should also work with other programs that use gstreamer:

  1. Enable the universe and multiverse repositories. Then, install the package ubuntu-restricted-extras (which is not included by default, it is the end-user that chooses to install it).
  2. If you now restart Sound Juicer via Applications > Sound & Video > Audio CD Extractor you will find the new audio formats available under Edit > Preferences.

(It is illegal to copy music from a CD and redistribute it unless you have the copyright owner's permission).

You can legally use the Fluendo MP3 decoder available in the Partners repository.

If anything you are better of using:

Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC are patent free.

• Ogg Vorbis is similar to mp3 except it is of course free. It compresses audio to save space while retaining audio quality. The quality of vorbis was tested to be higher or equal to competitors such as wma and apple audio.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg_vorbis

• FLAC is a lossless free software format, which means it creates an exact replica of the audio you convert it from. (Mp3 and vorbis remove quality to save space). I personally use flac, which means I get full quality 44,100hz 16bit CD audio saving almost half the space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flac

JPEG 2000 Legal issues

JPEG 2000 is by itself licensed, but the contributing companies and organizations agreed that licenses for its first part—the core coding system—can be obtained free of charge from all contributors. The JPEG committee has stated:

• It has always been a strong goal of the JPEG committee that its standards should be implementable in their baseline form without payment of royalty and license fees... The up and coming JPEG 2000 standard has been prepared along these lines, and agreement reached with over 20 large organizations holding many patents in this area to allow use of their intellectual property in connection with the standard without payment of license fees or royalties.

However, the JPEG committee has also noted that undeclared and obscure submarine patents may still present a hazard:

• It is of course still possible that other organizations or individuals may claim intellectual property rights that affect implementation of the standard, and any implementers are urged to carry out their own searches and investigations in this area

Because of this statement, controversy remains in the software community concerning the legal status of the JPEG 2000 standard.

However, many Linux distributions include a JPEG 2000 library

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000#Legal_issues

Licensing:

GPL & LGPL

1. “GPL” stands for “General Public License”. The most widespread such license is the GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL for short. This can be further shortened to “GPL”, when it is understood that the GNU GPL is the one intended.

   The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.

2. Short for Lesser General Public License, the license that accompanies some open source software that details how the software and its accompany source code can be freely copied, distributed and modified.The LGPL and GPL licenses differ with one major exception; with LGPL the the requirement that you open up the source code to your own extensions to the software is removed.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

Creative Commons

• The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law
  1. Attribution
  2. Attribution-ShareAlike
  3. Attribution-NoDerivs
  4. Attribution-NonCommercial
  5. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
  6. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

As says wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)

"Wine is a compatibility layer. It duplicates functions of Windows by providing alternative implementations of the DLLs that Windows programs call,[4] and a process to substitute for the Windows NT kernel."

So, WINE is set of in-house developed libraries, one side of which (visible to programs) is the Windows API, and the other side (visible to linux kernel and linux libraries, like glibc and libX11) is POSIX, Linux and X11 API. Also, there is special loader of windows programs which can read EXE file, load it and all needed DLL libraries to the memory, connect everything with internal Wine libraries and system libraries and run it. There can be several helper programs inside WINE too.

As there is two different operating system windows (closed source) and Ubuntu (Linux open-source)

Wine provides its own versions of various Window system DLLs. Wine also has the ability to load native Windows DLLs. Attempting to call into the Windows kernel directly is unsupported. If your Windows program makes calls that Linux can handle, then Wine passes them on to the Linux kernel. If the program wants to do something that Linux can't do, then Wine translates the call into something that Linux can deal with first.

Both OSs (Windows and Ubuntu) have different APIs (and ABIs (Application Binary Interface)). Windows has WinAPI, and Linux has POSIX API, with some additional Linux-specific APIs, graphics APIs (like X11) and with its own Linux ABI. Different APIs don't let you, for example, open the file, and read from it, if you are using wrong API. This difference is not about package management, but about interfacing between programs, libraries, and OS kernels.

Then Why wine is important and what means by "Wine Is Not an Emulator"?

An emulator should load program instructions, parse them, and imitate their actions. So, emulators of ARM are possible on x86 (Intel). For example, there is the great qemu (name decoded as "Quick EMUlator"), or an older x86 emulator written in C - bochs. Emulators usually emulate an entire PC, starting from the BIOS, processors and HDDs, and they boot into the OS you install on this virtual PC.

WINE is not an emulator because it doesn't interpret instructions of target binary or simulate processors. It just loads a program into memory and provides an API translation from WinAPI to the host's POSIX/Linux APIs (and Xlib for graphics and mouse, and some other API for sound, etc).

why it is projected (or what is need/why it should allow to) to run windows programmes on Ubuntu?

WINE was projected much before Ubuntu was created, the project was started in 1993 after Solaris's similar project "Wabi". It is useful to have the capability to start applications that are made to run on another OS, especially if this other OS is used widely, and has a lot of software (and games) created exclusively for it which can't be started directly from any other OS like Unix, Solaris or Linux.

However it is not fully supports several software of windows and graphics.

WINE can't have the exact implementation of all WinAPI (some parts of it are undocumented) and all needed libraries. Some Windows programs are using APIs or libraries which are not implemented, so they can't work with WINE.

And what is parallel packages like cross-over,play on linux?

Crossover is commercial variant of WINE with better support, some helper GUI tools (to easy install some software) and verified compatibility list of working windows programs and games. Usually you should pay some (40 US$) money to CodeWeavers, developers of CrossOver, in order to use the package for long time and have support. CodeWeavers (small company) supports wine project, by resending all patches to it, and by paying to several wine developers. According to wikipedia:

"CrossOver is developed by CodeWeavers, based on Wine, an open-source Windows compatibility layer. CodeWeavers modifies the Wine source code, applies compatibility patches, adds configuration tools that are more user-friendly, and provides technical support. CodeWeavers employs several Wine software developers, and contributes source code to Wine."