Questions about patents is related to which law applies to Mageia. No answers to which law then no clear policy can be applied. For me, since Mageia.org will lead the project (and will own Mageia trademarks) is located in France, since build system of Mageia will be in France then French law is the law we have to consider for Mageia. Debian runs under SPI organization located in the state of New York, USA, thus is ruled by US Laws.
As we keep going round in circles, do we have anyone on-board with firm knowledge on international patent/licence laws in this domain (lawyer)? Should we just check with the FSF.org and they could give us an opinion on this? Maybe someone from the Mageia core group could check behind the scenes with the FSF?
If anything, the laws of most countries adhere to the notion that "being ignorant of the law is no excuse". If we are to put "questionable" software on different servers, we should maybe get crystal clear facts on the ramifications of doing so. How did the other distros go about making their decisions? I would check with the MAJOR distros, as this is what Mageia is all about. People all over will clamour for our distro. We are going to be a MAJOR and influential distro. So we should behave this way as well when we are setting up our mirror network.
So, it sounds to me, that a core group individual, should, as an official representative of the Mageia project, approach these organisations and FSF to check and to get advice/opinons. Just to make sure.
Marc
