Re: pbmplus/netpbm & /usr/bin
> I was thinking about this too. What's preferred? I was thinking that I
> wanted to fix p?mforge and use the elf libraries before I uploaded it
> but I realized that I should just upload it and then work on those other
> issues. I can set this up either way.
I can upload the complete deb+source+diff for an ELF compiled netpbm
package for you, I did it last night when I finally got some free
time.
> The other issue here is the gif copyright issue. What I was
> conjecturing was to make a netpbm-gif package that contained all the gif
> code. This would go into non-free with the rest of netpbm going into
> graphics. How does that sound?
There are two seperate problems. 1) The licensing issues of
developers for using the GIF algorithm and 2) The copyright issue of
the program copyrights for all the netpbm programs.
The first is not something I can really comment on. I found a copy of
the license on http://www.lpf.org/Patents/Gif/gif.lic. Ian M., are
there any GNU lawyers we can draw on to tell us what we need to do?
If not, we should probably just drop support of ppmtogif (which would
stink, but we don't want to get into a legal problem with Compuserve).
As you know, I have always stuck pbmplus in non-free, this had been
because of the GIF problem. I would have done the same with netpbm
because of the copyright statement for netpbm. The copyright says:
Netpbm consists of code contributed by many authors. In every file of
the source code, there is a copyright notice, telling you what you may
or may not do with the code. All authors have granted you the right to
use and distribute their code without having to pay them, as long as
you do it on a non-commercial basis. Most authors allow you to do even
more, but remember to check their copyright notices.
Unless you want to go through *every* *single* binary to check the
copyright, and make a binary/graphics/ subset of netpbm and a
non-free/binary/ subset, you should stick it in non-free.
Jim
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