Re: GNOME following a non-free standard

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu>]

All ISO standards are only available from your local standard
body or by paying online maybe.  Does it mean GNOME should not
respect that?  No.  Publishing standards has its own expenses,
and we respect that, right?

behdad


On Mon, 23 May 2005, 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.
>
> Christian

--behdad
http://behdad.org/