[Freegis-list] Re: ECW and MrSID and JPEG2K

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 03:10:30PM -0600, Roger Bedell wrote:
> After reading some posts, it looks like this is a hot topic with the
> JPEG2000 people as well. Submarine patents, etc. However, since the
> Unisys burn with GIF, everyone knows no developer in their right mind
> would touch a still image format that has patents on it. However, GIS
> people obviously have no such compunction ie, ErMapper, MrSID etc. are
> the defacto GIS standards for compressed imagery - should we stand by
> and take this? 

They are proprietory "standards" and the Free Software community 
has to avoid them. The long term perspective will be to develop
a format with similiar qualities being unencumbered by patents.
It is hard work. The audio people managed to do this with the ogg format.

Another problem with the licensing of patents is 
that the royality free license has to be unlimited.
There must be no possibility to terminate it.

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