On Tue, 2004-03-02 at 21:04, Martin Schulze wrote: > Bradley Kuhn reminded us of the [4]GIF patent that IBM > holds until 2006, even though the Unisys patent will expire soon. > 4. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
Right. And this is how I responded: > In the thread at debian-legal, we also concluded that it doesn't > make sense to respect every stupid patent because then we could just > discontinue to work on Debian and GNU. Anthony DeRobertis noted that we > just care about companies known to haunt patent infringements by Free > Software. Even if IBM would start to do that, we would be in a good > position because because of the Unisys patent, the "invention" of IBM is > legally to consider as prior art and therefore void. Bradley considered this a "reasonable position". If we don't have decided otherwise on debian-legal until 7 July, I will probably start to move the packages in question to main together with Andreas Barth. But if we decide to be more pedantic about this one (extend the waiting period) I will set hyperlatex free for adoption (or orphan it). Note that in this case we should seriously think about removing GTK+, Qt etc. from main because of the reasons discussed earlier on debian-legal [1]. bye, Roland [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/debian-legal-200402/msg00168.html
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