20 July 2007

Daniel Martin commented:

"Often, dustups like these are the result of upstream not caring about one or more of the following: 1) Licenses. Many people will release code with no license attached to it at all, which means (Thanks to the wonders of the Berne convention) that no one else can distribute it. 2) Patent restrictions (the gif patent issue is now dead, but there's still patents on some other graphic formats) 3) Restrictions against selling the software for commercial gain, using the software in the military, in biotech, etc. The netpbm copyright file seems to include instances of each of these. I don't know how it escalated into being unable to build based on upstream."

Thanks for the info. I'm still surprised debian doesn't keep a (maybe big) patchset rather than a fork on this one. I don't remember what put me off it, but maybe imagemagick isn't so bad...