On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 11:58:28AM +1200, Matthew Grant wrote: > Could you please withdraw the nomarch package from the main upload > queue. This thing belongs in non-free. > Sorry about this. I have tried to be careful. Who would have thought > that such an obvious compression technique (Run Length Encoding - count > number of bytes in a row of same value, store count and byte value) is > covered by a software patent? Due to only using LZW decompression and > Huffman encoding, I thought that this thing was in the clear. Instead > I find compression technology has a big raft of software patents... > See the compresion FAQ up at > ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/compression-faq/ section 1 > for the goods on it.... > Could you please withdraw the nomarch package from the main upload > queue. This thing belongs in non-free. > I have just done some further investigation of the IP behind this thing, > and the RLE decoding is covered by a Hitachi patent 4,586,027 (filed > 08/07/84, granted 04/29/86) that is due to run out in July 2004 I > believe. Patents have not generally been regarded as rendering software non-free. If the license on the software itself meets the DFSG, I believe it's sufficient to move the package to non-US/main, rather than to non-free. (Note also that tagging the package as 'non-free' doesn't grant anyone the right to distribute it in countries where doing so infringes on a patent-holder's rights.) Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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