On Mon, 2005-05-23 at 17:52 +0200, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote: > 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. Hard to answer in complete absence of details. The ISO C standard is not freely available, we rely on C in GNOME. But in general, I think if the non-availability of the standard would inhibit people hacking on GNOME, that would be a pretty big discouragement to such a dependency. If it's very well encapsulated (a media format, say), then probably nobody will much care as long as the use of the standard isn't restricted. Regards, Owen
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