[Is there a lawyer in the room?] JPEG-LS license issue
Hi there,
I am trying to understand some license issue I am having. Could
someone let me know if the following is compatible with a debian
package:
>From the [For License Of Certain Hewlett-Packard Patents Relating To
Lossless and Near-Lossless Image Compression] page (*)
The following statement should prevent having an implement of JPEG-LS in debian:
...
III. OTHER TERMS
1. Licensee may not assign the license granted hereunder to any
party at any time without the prior explicit written consent of HP,
except to an acquirer of substantially all of Licensee's assets with
written notice to HP.
...
Is this correct ?
What I do not understand is implementation such as CharLS, which declare:
...
Legal
The code in this project is available through a BSD style license,
allowing use of the code in commercial closed source applications if
you wish. All the code in this project is written from scratch, and
not based on other JPEG-LS implementations. Be aware that Hewlett
Packard claims to own patents that apply to JPEG-LS implementations,
but they license it for free for conformant JPEG-LS implementations.
Read more at http://www.hpl.hp.com/loco/ before you use this if you
use this code for commercial purposes.
Ref: http://charls.codeplex.com/
...
As a side note ffmpeg/libavcodec now ships an implementation of JPEG-LS:
$ apt-get source -t testing libavcodec-dev
$ find ffmpeg-debian-0.svn20090303 | grep jpegls
ffmpeg-debian-0.svn20090303/libavcodec/jpegls.h
ffmpeg-debian-0.svn20090303/libavcodec/jpeglsenc.c
ffmpeg-debian-0.svn20090303/libavcodec/jpeglsdec.h
ffmpeg-debian-0.svn20090303/libavcodec/jpeglsdec.c
ffmpeg-debian-0.svn20090303/libavcodec/jpegls.c
I have bcc :
1. The main author of CharLs,
2. The main persons behind the implementation of ffmpeg/jpegls codec,
in case they have worked on the subject or would like to add something, thanks !
Regards,
--
Mathieu
(*) http://www.hpl.hp.com/loco/JPEGLSTerms.htm
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