Re: imagemagick and imagemagick-nonfree issue
On Aug 21, Joseph Carter wrote:
> The whole reason that this is considered non-free is the LZW patent
> and I have not seen this enforced evenly, rationally, fairly, or
> sanely among packages. The LZW patent affects only the US (anyone
> have an idea for how long?) and putting the patented software in
> non-free puts us at the same risk(?) putting it in main would and in
> fact there is LZW-gif stuff in main.
My understanding (probably flawed) is that the LZW patent only covers
compression, not decompression. So reading GIFs is OK, just not
writing them (at least, not unless you use the "uncompressed GIF"
hack). This is why gzip can legally uncompress .Z (Unix compressed)
archives.
Now, if you can't separate the uncompression code cleanly from the
compression code, then the whole shebang goes into "somewhere else".
But if a reading module can be compiled separately from the writing
module, then only the writing part has to go "somewhere else".
Another of my understandings is that software patents (and patents in
general) only apply if they are enforced by the patenter consistently;
Unisys's distinct lack of consistent enforcement may undermine the
legal status of their patent, especially in a jury trial (your 8th
Amendment rights at work).
(On the topic of patents: the idea of using the right mouse button to
pop up a menu [!] is patented too. Somebody made a chunk of money
going after Commodore for that one, and I suppose they settled with M$
a while back. But to my knowledge they didn't go after, e.g., the X
Consortium for twm, or the author of any other WM for that matter. So
a lack of consistent enforcement defense would be valid there too.)
Chris
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