GNOME following a non-free standard

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus gnome org>]

Hi, 
A practical issue I was wondering about. As you might know there are a
lot of standards out there while not covered by royalties due to
patents etc, but the standard specification have a license on it making
it not possible to share it freely.

Do we have a de-facto policy on such stuff? Is it ok to base core GNOME
libraries on implementations of such standards? Lets say as an example
that I write a library called libstandard which is an implementation of
such a standard and put it under the LGPL and then I get gtk to depend
on that library. The code is under a free license, but if anyone but me
wants to hack on the library they might have a problem doing so due to
not being able/willing to buy the standard specification and due to that
not being able to judge easily wether their changes will break anything
in regards to that specification.

I guess historically such things have been accepted at some level
although often in layers under GNOME, but I thought I ask here what
people think as some of my proposals for GNOME 3 might run into issues
like this.

Christian 

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