I'm cc'ing debian-legal for the legal part of this discussion. LZW was a patented algorithm which was included in Unix's compress and some versions of the gif file format.
There may not be reason to exclude lzw and related code as the LZW patent is "running out". http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200211/msg00160.html I hope that this will be discussed further on debian-legal. I also am curious as to whether Unisys can collect royalties after their patent runs out. I suspect this may be illegal, or at least immoral. I also wonder about whether patent laws can be used from one country on another. Regardless, I don't think it's too important as long as we make sure Debian doesn't do anything illegal. The patent on lzw may have already expired. Due to it not expiring in all countries at the same time, some caution is needed in deciding when to include relevant lzw code. Perhaps in the style of non-us, or perhaps non-free alternatives. When I figure out what kind of bugs to file against which packages I'll look at doing a Mass Bug filing e-mail to Debian-devel. IMHO, it should usually be a normal bug against packages that have purposely removed lzw code, but I'll probably go with wishlist so as to ruffle fewer feathers. Some might say that I should wait for the patent to expire in all countries, but I don't know when that is, and even if I did, it wouldn't hurt to have a place marker. This place marker might allow maintainers to consider how lzw code could be brought back into their packages. http://groups.google.com/groups?&threadm=a5aa8dd0.0208271613.3cd18da6%40posting.google.com suggests that the Europe lzw patent is the last to expire which might be June 19, 2004 or later in the thread, Japan's lzw patent on June 20, 2004. I'm not sure if these are enforcible, but it may be worth worrying about. In http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=172181 written at Wed Dec 18 03:15:08 2002, [EMAIL PROTECTED] says that it "seems to be running out this month in the US. But is remains valid in .de till 2004 (or 2003 if Unisys did not pay the last fee)" Could anyone volunteer to find out which packages could benefit from, had or have lzw code in them? Packages that depend on libungif type packages could likely easily be changed to point to the equivalent libgif packages. I did some preliminary research w/o looking at any code and found the following information: Some source packages with claiming to have lzw code: giflib (giflib-bin, giflib3g, giflib3g-dev) gimp-nonfree (gimp, libgimp-dev, libgimp1) ncompress possibly contains lzw code: libgd-gif1-dev libgd-gif1 gif2png bk2site giftrans gif2png gimageview gfontview libsdl-image1.2 xloadimage pike-image python-imaging python2.2-imaging Unlikely, but possibly contains lzw code: libming-util paul wml non-free (lzw code could be there) whirlgif xearth gifsicle gfont zoo netpbm-nonfree non-free (lzw code is claimed to be there) ncompress giflib-bin giflib3g giflib3g-dev gimp1.2-nonfree gimp1.3-nonfree Packages that disappeared that may have had lzw code: xv (bug 98215) Can't find: lib-gif-tools Claimed not to contain lzw gif code: openoffice.org (bug filed #172181) gs (bug filed #177628) gs-aladdin (bug filed #177631) libungif4g libungif4-dev libungif-bin latex2html (description says: "Because of certain legal limitations on the use of the GIF image format, GIF support is disabled in this package.", but is lzw out of the original source?) libtk-img (description says: "GIF (transparency supported, but not LZW)", but is lzw not in the original source?) hevea (description says: "This version of HeVeA is patched to generate by default picture files in the PNG format instead of the GIF format.", but is lzw out of the original source?) Drew Daniels
