lzw code & patent
I'm cc'ing debian-legal for the legal part of this discussion.
LZW was a patented algorithm which was included in Unix's compress and
some versions of the gif file format.
There may not be reason to exclude lzw and related code as the LZW
patent is "running out".
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200211/msg00160.html
I hope that this will be discussed further on debian-legal. I also am
curious as to whether Unisys can collect royalties after their patent runs
out. I suspect this may be illegal, or at least immoral. I also wonder
about whether patent laws can be used from one country on another.
Regardless, I don't think it's too important as long as we make sure
Debian doesn't do anything illegal.
The patent on lzw may have already expired. Due to it not expiring in all
countries at the same time, some caution is needed in deciding when to
include relevant lzw code. Perhaps in the style of non-us, or perhaps
non-free alternatives.
When I figure out what kind of bugs to file against which packages I'll
look at doing a Mass Bug filing e-mail to Debian-devel. IMHO, it should
usually be a normal bug against packages that have purposely removed lzw
code, but I'll probably go with wishlist so as to ruffle fewer feathers.
Some might say that I should wait for the patent to expire in all
countries, but I don't know when that is, and even if I did, it wouldn't
hurt to have a place marker. This place marker might allow maintainers to
consider how lzw code could be brought back into their packages.
http://groups.google.com/groups?&threadm=a5aa8dd0.0208271613.3cd18da6%40posting.google.com
suggests that the Europe lzw patent is the last to expire which might
be June 19, 2004 or later in the thread, Japan's lzw patent on June 20,
2004. I'm not sure if these are enforcible, but it may be worth worrying
about.
In http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=172181 written at Wed
Dec 18 03:15:08 2002, rene@debian.org says that it
"seems to be running out this month in the US. But is remains valid in .de
till 2004 (or 2003 if Unisys did not pay the last fee)"
Could anyone volunteer to find out which packages could benefit from, had
or have lzw code in them? Packages that depend on libungif type packages
could likely easily be changed to point to the equivalent libgif packages.
I did some preliminary research w/o looking at any code and found the
following information:
Some source packages with claiming to have lzw code:
giflib (giflib-bin, giflib3g, giflib3g-dev)
gimp-nonfree (gimp, libgimp-dev, libgimp1)
ncompress
possibly contains lzw code:
libgd-gif1-dev
libgd-gif1
gif2png
bk2site
giftrans
gif2png
gimageview
gfontview
libsdl-image1.2
xloadimage
pike-image
python-imaging
python2.2-imaging
Unlikely, but possibly contains lzw code:
libming-util
paul
wml
non-free (lzw code could be there)
whirlgif
xearth
gifsicle
gfont
zoo
netpbm-nonfree
non-free (lzw code is claimed to be there)
ncompress
giflib-bin
giflib3g
giflib3g-dev
gimp1.2-nonfree
gimp1.3-nonfree
Packages that disappeared that may have had lzw code:
xv (bug 98215)
Can't find:
lib-gif-tools
Claimed not to contain lzw gif code:
openoffice.org (bug filed #172181)
gs (bug filed #177628)
gs-aladdin (bug filed #177631)
libungif4g
libungif4-dev
libungif-bin
latex2html (description says: "Because of certain legal limitations on the
use of the GIF image format, GIF support is disabled in this package.",
but is lzw out of the original source?)
libtk-img (description says: "GIF (transparency supported, but not LZW)",
but is lzw not in the original source?)
hevea (description says: "This version of HeVeA is patched to generate by
default picture files in the PNG format instead of the GIF format.", but
is lzw out of the original source?)
Drew Daniels
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