Hi,
I believe that something like that is easily commented out, and does not require a removal of the entire lib.
No, that is already disabled by default as far as I know, we are talking about another patent: U.S. Patent 4,698,672 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=4,698,672 that will expire on *October 27, 2006.*
Also I'd also like to explain that this lib was never used. It did only import it into /vendor and not into /trunk/reactos/lib, so a revert of my delete would be pointless if none wants to write code that uses it. I do have imported it in my working copy, together with a almost done patch for jpeg-wallpaper loading, but I have decided not to commit it until *October 27, 2006.
*Here is a quote from interesting quote from wikipedia:
In 2002 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002 Forgent Networks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgent_Networks asserted that it owns and will enforce patent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent rights on the JPEG technology, arising from a patent that had been filed in 1986 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986 (U.S. Patent 4,698,672 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=4,698,672). The announcement has created a furor reminiscent of Unisys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys' attempts to assert its rights over the GIF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF image compression standard.
The JPEG committee investigated the patent claims in 2002 and are of the opinion that they were invalidated by prior art. Others have also concluded that Forgent doesn't have a patent that covers JPEG. Nevertheless, between 2002 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002 and 2004 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004 Forgent was able to obtain about $90 million by licensing their patent to some 30 companies. In April 2004 Forgent sued 31 other companies to enforce further license payments. In July of the same year, a consortium of 21 large computer companies filed a countersuit, with the goal of invalidating the patent. However, as of July 2005, the battle is still ongoing ). Surprisingly, in contrast to the other major computer companies such as Sony and Philips, Microsoft has launched a major lawsuit against Forgent. In principle, the Forgent patent will expire in 2006.
The JPEG committee has as one of its explicit goals that their standards (in particular their baseline methods) be implementable without payment of license fees, and they have secured appropriate license rights for their upcoming JPEG 2000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000 standard from over 20 large organizations.
PS: I did already write to mailing list once because of this. topic is "[ros-dev] libjpeg"
Best regards,
Maarten Bosma