"Chromium" removed from maemo.org repositories

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2010-06-10 12:55 UTC by Andrew Flegg

This is a joint statement from Nokia and the Maemo Community Council.

A few weeks ago we received a letter requesting that maemo.org cease distribution of Chromium, due to ongoing litigation involving the software.

The Community Council, the package maintainer of Chromium on maemo.org and Nokia legal were contacted.

As you are aware, it is Nokia's policy to respect the intellectual property rights of third parties. Thus, we suggested that Chromium be removed from maemo.org while the situation was clarified.

Nokia legal will be taking a look on the roles and responsibilities of maemo.org. This work should clarify the roles on maemo.org so the process would be clear if we were to receive any future requirements as the one from Red Bend.

 

Comments:

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Angel Marin
Angel Marin
Karma: 5

Fedora/RedHat had a similar situation earlier this year (http://spot.livejournal.com/313759.html) with the chromium packages (even though they don't have them in their official repos), but after some surgery to the codebase they went back to shipping the packages.

You might want to contact them to see what parts of the code they had to remove to keep their legal department happy.

2010-06-11 12:43 UTC
Benoît HERVIER
Benoît HERVIER
Karma: 1414

Oh !!!! Congratulations !!!

I ask also for some of my packages to be removed ! But it wasn't a success.

2010-06-11 12:26 UTC
Felipe Contreras
Felipe Contreras
Karma: 447

Chromium is not owned by anyone, Chrome is. Just like WebKit is not owned, Safari is, or Fedora is not owned, RedHat EL is.

maemo.org extras is a community repository... it's not owned by Nokia, and as such, Nokia interests do not matter. We are not talking about Apple Store.

Or is Nokia going to remove MPlayer, console emulators, and other kinds of software that might infringe patents?

I want to install Chromium on my device, Nokia should not prevent that.

2010-06-10 22:51 UTC
Andrew Flegg
Andrew Flegg
Karma: 3343

Zachary, thoughts specifically about your points can be found here: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=708941&postcount=20

2010-06-10 16:03 UTC
Zachary Goldberg
Zachary Goldberg
Karma: 108

"As you are aware, it is Nokia's policy to respect the intellectual property rights of third parties. Thus, we suggested that Chromium be removed from maemo.org while the situation was clarified."

If it was a fact that chromium violated somebody's IP I would have no problem with the execution of this policy here. However the IP invovled is still in question and not yet decided, so I would think that Nokia/Maemo would have no obligation to remove the software until it was. Any thoughts?

2010-06-10 15:51 UTC
Andrew Flegg
Andrew Flegg
Karma: 3343

Open source doesn't mean that a company can't sue you for (allegedly) violating its patents.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/28/red_bend_sues_google/

Hopefully this situation can be resolved relatively quickly (lawyers are never quick), and Chromium can go back into the repos.

2010-06-10 15:07 UTC
hyar tep
hyar tep
Karma: 73

could you, please, write more about the problem / litigation?

i don't know the situation and others probably too.

thanks.

btw: the link [1] is not working for me

2010-06-10 15:02 UTC
Joseph Charpak
Joseph Charpak
Karma: 130

Huh. Isn't Chromium open source? Isn't that the point? Isn't Chromium the open source bits from Chrome?

2010-06-10 15:00 UTC
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