Re: Patent Pending on Sheba arabic Gnome based distribution

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Ali Abdin <aliabdin@aucegypt.edu> writes:

> >     - The patches are Arabic specific and would never have been folded back 
> >       into GTK+, even if we didn't have the code already to do it
> >       right.
> > 
> > It would probably be a good idea if one of our Arabic speakers looked
> > at the article, and if necessary politely contacted the company to
> > make sure that they were aware of their obligations under the GPL and
> > LGPL.
> 
> I'd like to point out www.linux4arab.com has nothing to do with this.
> linux4arab is just a 'community site' for Arabic-related stuff to Linux - so
> they just have a story. The creators/sellers of this 'SHEBA' thing is
> www.linuxvision.net

[ Sorry for not making that clear ]
 
> I can not see how they are violating or not obligating the GPL/LGPL? If
> somebody can give me specific clauses I can contact them regarding that (via
> email). As far as I know they make Gtk+/GNOME pathces available, but they sell
> their product (not a violation as far as I know). So what is the violation? :)

The only concern I would have is that their GTK+/GNOME patches are
not, by themselves, complete. The seem to require linking to some
other library which is not included in the patches as far as I could
see (though I only glanced through the patches.) If that library was
proprietary, and then they linked GPL apps against that GTK+, they
would be violating the GPL.

Of course, from what I could tell, the possible proprietary library 
was probably about a days work, so I'm not exactly going to get
too worried.
 
> Note: they also add 'other' packages to their 'distro' (such as 'acon' which
> is an Arabic console application). What irks me about this though, is that
> many people in the Arab community (who are still largely naive about Linux)
> will just believe that this company 'created' these products (they seem to
> pass it off as if its their creation).
>  
> > Basically, I'm happy to see someone out there warming the Arabic for
> > GTK+ and GNOME waters. It will still 6-9 months before we have a
> > standard version of GNOME with full Arabic support; when we do, I'm
> > sure this company will switch over to using it.
 
> I would be very happy to see Arabic support too, but not this
> way. This is too proprietary and seems inappropriate. This is not
> the way I envisioned it at least.
> 
> I'd much rather wait for 6-9 months than see a few patches to old
> gnome-libs/Gtk+ versions in order to get Arabic fonts to render.

Well, I'm glad to hear that :-) and I'm sure we'll have something
considerably sooner for bleeding edge adopters. But, if other people 
want to try out stop-gap solutions, I'm not going to hinder them.

Regards,
                                        Owen