2008/10/23 Yuval Levy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Dear Guido and Harry, > > Guido Kohlmeyer wrote: > > Thus Yuv's aproach should be continued. > > my approach was to look at those who are more experienced and have more > resources than me. Red Hat, Novell, Canonical are all large corporations > producing popular Linux distributions. Canonical is based in U.K. and > AFAIK has nothing that makes it subject to US jurisdiction. Red Hat is > 100% US jurisdiction. Novell is an interesting case because it is a US > company that bought Suse, an off-shore subsidiary in Germany. > > All of them have their own lawyers and it can be safely assumed that > they are looking at all legal aspects pertinent to their distribution. > > Latest since the SCO lawsuits it has become clear how important it is to > know where the code comes from and what IP rights are attached to it. > > In an ideal world, those companies have legal compliance processes in > place that examine each piece of code before letting it into the > distribution. The processes may not be perfect, but they are better than > mine simply because they have the necessary resources. > > None of them includes SIFT code. > > >
The ones you mentioned may not include it in their distro's. Debian however, one of the strictest, does include it, and (K)Ubuntu, by now the biggest, also includes it. Red Hat and Novell do have big commercial interests with "big bugs" license contracts, maintenance contracts and support contracts with DELL, IBM, HP/Compac and others, where these contracts are expanded to (second line) commercial business partners of DELL, IBM, but also resellers and finally end-users (customers). Their commercial "part" is the part that keeps them alive these days and where they can't take risk. Their lawyers ONLY look at their commercial interests and risks and not to the (non interesting and risk less) GPL, open source "no bugs generating" part of it. That's a huge difference with Hugin and therefore not comparable at all (imo). As soon as Hugin is at the same level as RedHat (or MySQL as another example), it might be wise to spend more time to these kind of legal aspects. I have no fear whatsoever that "The university of British Columbia" will ever start a trial at a (commercial) panoVR photographer from the USA, using a Hugin "full package" from an Open Source packager. This will not be worth the effort (unless this photographer wins the world press photo or something like that and maybe even in that case I expect them (UBC) to use it as a showcase rather than a case for trial). Big businesses or organisations (organizations for USA residents, also different here) starting to use a "full package" hugin to generate money for their businesses/organisations might be a completely different case for UBC. @Guido: I suggested that "my" approach, a derivation of Yuv's approach, could be used. In Open Source it's still the packager who more or less decides what he/she wants to package (or risk). (And who is uncertain what is happening to him/her while he/she is serving the community with only the best intents as a volunteer spending many hours for others). Also a big difference with RedHat, who deliver "products and services" for "mainframe, server, desktop, small/medium/big companies" with the above mentioned (big bugs) contracts (and yes also for the non-commercial end-user). Also Ippei and I interpret things differently when it comes to these license cases. We've come to an agreement which we both feel serves us well (delivering autopano-sift-c as plugin as a separate, installable package within the Hugin package). However, we are both also not 100% happy with the situation. I am however a fan of Ippei's plugin solution as it gives the packager the flexibility and possibility to deliver a hugin and their accompanying plugins from one single webpage, but not as one package. This keeps it save (next to making it more flexible for the packager to create hugin svn packages and occasionally do a CP plugin upgrade). Hoi, Harry --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "hugin and other free panoramic software" group. A list of frequently asked questions is available at: http://wiki.panotools.org/Hugin_FAQ To post to this group, send email to hugin-ptx@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/hugin-ptx -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
