On Thu, Dec 02, 1999 at 09:42:09AM -0800, Don Marti wrote: > On Wed, Dec 01, 1999 at 11:24:52PM -0700, Richard Stallman wrote: > > > You are entirely right that programs prohibited by patents > > in some countries should not be treated like programs > > restricted by their authors. > > > > gimp-nonfree should be renamed and reclassified as a free non-us > > package. > > LZW is patented in countries other than the US -- "United States Patent > No. 4,558,302, Japanese Patent Numbers 2,123,602 and 2,610,084, and > patents in Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom." > according to http://corp2.unisys.com/LeadStory/lzwfaq.html > > The Debian policy -- http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch2.html > -- says that non-us is for cryptography that can't legally be exported > from the US. But there are countries from which you can export crypto > in which the LZW patent is enforced. > > As a practical matter, I discourage anyone from distributing any GIF > files or software to create them. I want GIF to join Betamax, DIVX, and > SDMI on the junk pile of formats whose "owners" killed them by trying to > keep them proprietary. It will help to make an argument for openness and > interoperability that even the most clueless of managers can understand. > > But if you must have a category for "free software to create a GIF", > neither non-us nor non-free seems to apply.
I know, this will be highly controversive : SERIOUS SUGGESTION FOR WOODY : we should get rid of all gif-making packages except 1 package a2gif in non-free, which will allow you to convert other images to gifs if you REALLY need it. In description of this package there should be : `using GIFs is HIGHLY discouraged due to patent problems. Consider chosing another format (ex. jpeg or png)' I have already made a little (ok, very little) effort in this way, and Ive sent patches to xearth 1.1 so the future version of xearth may be finaly free (+jpeg, +png, -gif) I hope maintainers and developers of other gif-making software will do sobme effort to use other formats and eventually will make GIFs thru pipes, so this soft will temportary be in contrib and will go main with a very little hacking
