Re: regular (aka bsd) compress distribution?
Bruce Perens:
> this situation is that it's lawsuit bait for me to distribute patented
> software without a license. If you look on Unisys web page, they say
> yes you definitely need a license. Red Hat could have one for all I know.
I'm not suggesting that we do anything illegal. If Red Hat can have
a license, maybe we could have one too. I've sent a question to
lzw_info@unisys.com about this - we'll see...
> You guys don't pay for Debian. Do I owe it to you to risk my home and all
> I own just because you want an obsolete Unix utility?
I don't want anyone to risk anything, I just don't believe that the
problem is so serious because nobody else seems to care about it.
If it is - better move the distribution outside the US now, it only
gets worse. Not only something that was in the public domain may be
patented, you can also get in trouble if there is a four-letter word
in some package. It is very unfortunate that most Linux distributions
come from the US, and users around the world have to live with such
silly restrictions. And the free world is only 100ms away...
compress may be obsolete, but it's still the standard. Files produced
by gzip can't be uncompressed on systems which come with compress but
without gzip. It is not always possible to compile gzip on them -
they often come without a C compiler. And it's more than just compress
- also various programs using the GIF format, which are non-free in
Debian for just this reason. Yes, there are better formats than GIF,
but GIF is unfortunately still the widely used standard.
Proposal: not necessarily before the 1.1 release, but perhaps one of
the many non-US Debian mirror sites could become the primary site.
Now we can maintain the full international distribution, and remove
certain packages (compress, GIF, PGP, ssh, ...) only from CD-ROMs
sold in the US. This way we can keep everyone reasonably happy.
Regards,
Marek
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