[Mageia-dev] About panotools patent problem (and other problematic rpms)

[Philippe DIDIER]

Quote: rdalverny wrote on Tue, 22 February 2011 11:04
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> >> Long time ago,
> 
> How long is a "long time ago"? because every patent has a term and
> here it may have expired.
> 

Long time ago means 1999..
Actually the problem has not expired : Bruno Postle the main dev of hugin
and panotools projects uses fedora and builds the rpm for Fedora (and
proposes on his own repo rpms of the betas and release candidates ... )
He is certainly the guy that must be aware of the patent problems : he
still proposes a limited version of panotools on official Fedora's
repositories !!!

The source are written to be built with or without fov limitation depending
of the possible patent infringement (no limit in Europe...)

> List of questions to check would be at least:
>  - what is exactly covered by what patent (reference, registration,
> territory/ies for which it has been registered)?
>  - where is it implemented exactly in the source code? (
>  - who owns this patent?
>  - did the patent holder announce his clear intention upon it? (that
> is, is he using it to control/restrain use or not? *)
>  - are there obvious prior art that could make this patent obviously
> invalid?
>  - what is decided and when (and what may change the decision, later)?
>  - what would be alternative ways to implement the function (if the
> patent does not just cover the function, but a specific implementation
> of it)?
> 
> * one does not necessarily register a patent to be offensive with it;
> here, we knew about iPix, what about the new holder?
> 
> Btw, a draft policy for patents management was discussed among
> founders and other people (lawyers) months ago and a tentative summary
> written by me here:
> http://mageia.org/wiki/doku.php?id=software_patents_policy .
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Romain
> 
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Best regards
Philippe