Hi, I wonder if it is still possible for sarge to be released before 7 July 2004 (international expiration of US4558302). If not, we could start to move GIF/LZW patent encumbered packages from non-free and contrib to main.
More generally, I hope I'm not the only one aware of the fact that currently, many packages in main violate software patents. E.g. EP0394160 (the progress bar) and EP0689133 (notebooks). These two have their equivalents in US, JP and other regions and are used heavily by popular GUI based programs (e.g. using GTK+, Qt and the toolkits themselves). These are just examples (see http://webshop.ffii.org/ for others), though "trivial" ones, but I doubt that these and all the others will be deleted some day. I wonder what Debian considers the threshold of importance for patents that can be ignored and patents that we care about. Thanks. bye, Roland
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