Colin, I'm looking at the R3D SDK license agreement right now, and I see no
such thing. It says that you can't use their trademarks to market your products
or imply that they endorse it, but that's totally ordinary and in fact is also
stipulated by the BSD open source license. It wouldn't prevent a bland factual
statement that you support the format.
The license is not all that awful, it's just ambiguous. The problem, as I see
it, is that it says it covers "[using] the Software for the sole purpose of
internally developing Developer Programs," and also that "'Developer Programs'
means compiled code generated using the Software, or any part thereof, designed
to function with RED Products." I'm just not sure what that means or how to
interpret this in an open source context where we are only distributing source
code, and none of it is their source code.
I suspect that the license itself dates from before the SDK was freely
downloadable on the web. It's got language that is more appropriate to
confidential information. Maybe the SDK itself used to be available only under
NDA? And after they made it so that anybody can download and inspect it, they
never updated the license?
Remember that the idea is that OIIO would not redistribute any part of the SDK
at all, not one byte. That's quite different than shipping a binary product
that would necessarily have parts of the SDK embedded in it. Is it "using" the
software to have program source code text that makes calls to the R3D API? Or
is it "using" the software only if you are the studio who builds OIIO in the
presence of the installed R3D libraries or that runs the software that makes
the calls (i.e., actually USING the software that Red makes)?
This should be a conceptually simple thing to clear up if I can find a human to
talk to. I just need a clear yes or no to "is it ok for an open source program
to make calls to their SDK, if no part of the SDK itself is distributed?"
Like I said, if anybody knows someone at Red, please put me in touch.
-- lg
> On Jul 22, 2019, at 8:50 PM, Colin Doncaster <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I realize that OIIO isn’t a part of the ASWF but I wonder if leveraging
> connections amongst members might come in handy?
>
> Based on the license agreement, the way it reads is that even if OIIO did
> support R3d files you’d wouldn’t be able to talk about it - it’s pretty much
> fight club.
>
>
>> On Jul 22, 2019, at 8:36 PM, Larry Gritz <[email protected]
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>
>> Coincidentally, I was just looking into this a couple weeks ago.
>>
>> You can download their SDK for free, and while you obviously can't
>> redistribute it, ordinarily there would be no particular reason why you
>> couldn't link against it if you built the software yourself (i.e., an
>> optional dependency that would enable r3d support if the r3d SDK was found
>> on the system and presumably properly licensed by the studio at the time
>> that they built their in-house copy of OIIO).
>>
>> But, reading their license, I found it ambiguously worded to the point of
>> being incomprehensible. It was just not clear if they disallowed only
>> distribution of their code (which would be expected) or if they were trying
>> to disallow even *calling* its API (which would be very unusual). It seemed
>> clear that it was OK to call it for in-house software, but the wording was
>> such that it didn't spell out the rules for open source software. It's not a
>> matter of trade secrets; like I said, anybody can download their SDK and
>> headers from their site.
>>
>> I wrote them a letter explaining the situation and asking for clarification,
>> but never got a reply at all.
>>
>> If anybody knows somebody there who could be put in touch with me, please
>> let me know. I would think that in a reasonable world, they would recognize
>> that OIIO support could only help their customers and would be of no
>> particular help to their competitors. So I can't even fathom what the
>> objection would be. But I won't do it if I can't get a clear word from them
>> that it's not violating their license.
>>
>> -- lg
>>
>>
>>> On Jul 22, 2019, at 6:19 PM, Colin Doncaster <[email protected]
>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>>
>>> If I recall R3D requires a specific license from Red to use and there might
>>> be sticky specifics about integrating into open source libraries, this
>>> could be the reason why libraw may have discontinued updates?
>>>
>>>> On Jul 22, 2019, at 6:07 PM, Alex Hughes <[email protected]
>>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hey I was wondering if OIIO supports reading r3d files.
>>>>
>>>> I was looking through the release notes for libraw and that states that it
>>>> could read r3d files.
>>>> https://www.libraw.org/node/1299 <https://www.libraw.org/node/1299>
>>>>
>>>> However, that was in 2011 and I would imagine things could have changed
>>>> since then.
>>>>
>>>> My oiiotool seems to seg fault when I try to read r3d files and I was
>>>> wondering if ti was even supposed to support r3d or if my build was just
>>>> broken in some way.
>>>>
>>>> I know Red likes to sell their SDK, but I was sort of hoping that LibRaw
>>>> had an implementation that we could rely on.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks
>>>> -Alex
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>>
>> --
>> Larry Gritz
>> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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--
Larry Gritz
[email protected]
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