20 Jan
2006
20 Jan
'06
9:54 p.m.
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