[Mageia-dev] Mirror layout

Philippe DIDIER philippedidier at laposte.net
Mon Dec 13 13:50:59 CET 2010


If you don't understand what are patent problems :
http://eupat.ffii.org/patents/effects/ipix/index.en.html

Helmut Dersch , a mathematics and physics professor in a German
University created algorythms to stitch photographs into a panorama
view, and proposed it as a free software (panotools)  !

He did it before than a USA company register patents for such kind of
program !

He had to remove his free software from his public university site to
get protected from legal action !
Some panorama fanatics fortunately provided copyes of those tools on
their own site and we could use them for years... it was the begining of
Hugin (a graphical interface to use these algorythms) and PTviewer

The libpano13 library which is proposed by Mandriva is limited in its
use not to infringe the USA law (we couldn't build a 360° panorama with
this library!).
PLF repo contains an unlimited version of this library . (same name but
not same "make" configuration : have a look on the spec file !) that
infringes the USA law !


The creator of a software can be prosecuted on the basis of patents even
if they were registered later !!!!

Being careful doesn't mean accepting this, but being aware of this !




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