* Kevin B. McCarty ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [040706 15:55]: > My understanding is that the last known patent on LZW compression held > by Unisys, in Canada, expires tomorrow, July 7th 2004. I plan to ask my > sponsor, Bas Zoetekouw, to upload a version of cernlib with compressed > GIF creation support added back in soon afterwards. (This may be > delayed several days from the expiry date due to some real-life > obligations I have.) Any objections?
I agree with that. I myself have some other gif-producing code I want to upload. This issue has been discussed in February, and the outcome was to me that it is ok to upload gif-producing code, even as there is a patent hold by IBM. The current policy seems to be to ignore patents as long as the patent holder doesn't activly enforce them: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/02/msg00174.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/02/msg00211.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/02/msg00261.html @ftpmasters: I was told that you are the ones who do the final decision what's allowed into main. If you see any reason to disallow uploading of gif-producing code after today, can you please say so? Cheers, Andi -- http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/ PGP 1024/89FB5CE5 DC F1 85 6D A6 45 9C 0F 3B BE F1 D0 C5 D1 D9 0C
