Re: Syncing photos

[Evan <eapache gmail com>]

I was referring more to the fact that putting in a file-type checker and blocking unsupported file-types would be easy, not to the additional conduits. I was also under the impression that actual new conduits wouldn't have to be written. A file converter would convert the files to a .pdb format readable by the program before the sync, and then they would be synced using the pre-existing file conduit. Yes, the converters would be complicated to write, but you wouldn't have to deal with any new IO conduits during the sync itself.

I'm unclear on the legal powers of these file formats. If they can sue us for using them, why hasn't MS sued Sun/OO.o or Writely (now Google) for use of the doc format (ooxml is technically open, but the older formats aren't).

On 10/1/07, David A. Desrosiers <desrod gnu-designs com> wrote:

> A blanket ban won't be hard to do at all, and we can implement
> converters for other formats as we think of them.

That's not as easy as you might think... not without any documentation
on the file formats used by these proprietary application vendors, and
not when these vendors threaten to sue if you release a FLOSS tool
that can read/deconstruct/reconstruct their proprietary data format.

I ran into this with Kodak several years ago at Palmsource, and one of
their representatives directly threatened me in front of about 15
bystanders, when I asked if they wanted to collaborate on writing a
conduit in pilot-link to extract their images from their image
database.

> This is definitely something that should be implemented because
> compiling par and using it are not something newbies want to do. It
> also doesn't take much new code, so it won't take long.

Every format is completely unique, and every version tends to be just
as unique. Photos v1.0 is different from Photos v2.0 for example, and
Photos v1.0 on a Sony device is not the same as Photos v1.0 on a Palm
device.

It gets complicated when you have to rewrite complete conduit logic
from scratch, after reverse-engineering every byte-on-the-wire for
each app and each version.


--
David A. Desrosiers
desrod gnu-designs com
http://projects.plkr.org/

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