Re: GNOME following a non-free standard

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus gnome org>]

On Mon, 2005-05-23 at 12:17 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> Most non-free standards would specifically exclude implementation in
> licenses we would consider acceptable, no?
Some yes, but in regards to my question lets say they do not impose such 
limitations. The only limitation is that we get a paper copy of the
specification and is not allowed to copy or redistribute it.

> Luis (who thinks writing more proposals about gnome3, as opposed to
> going and coding examples of the damn thing, is likely to be a waste
> of time, sorry)
Could be that I am wasting my time, but my question was not about if you
think I am putting my time to good use or not :)

Christian


> On 5/23/05, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus gnome org> 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.
> > 
> > Christian
> > 
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> > 
> >
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