faac is nonfree according to ffmpeg - What to do ?

[Kevin Kofler]

Nicolas Chauvet wrote:
> Some may know that the faac FOSS status if unsafe.

I guess that's because it's derived from the ISO MPEG reference 
implementation. That's definitely non-Free. :-/ Why do people copy non-Free 
code and then more or less claim it's LGPL? :-(

Careful there: the old faad 1 is just as affected:
http://faac.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/faac/faad/README?revision=1.8&view=markup

That's the same ISO MPEG license, which is non-Free due to:
"Copyright is not released for non MPEG-2 NBC/MPEG-4 Audio conforming 
products."
(That's a "you must comply to our standard" clause and that's non-Free as it 
doesn't allow reusing the code to implement a different standard.)

On the other hand, faad 2 is at least claimed to be free of the offending 
code:
http://faac.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/faac/faad2/README?revision=1.10&view=markup
so that one should be OK.

Hopefully, nothing ships builtin copies of the old version of faad!

        Kevin Kofler