[Phpgroupware-developers] The GIF issue

[Dan Kuykendall (Seek3r)]

Since we kept hearing complaints from Loic about us including GIFs in
phpGroupWare's CVS and soon tarballs on Savnnah I decided it was time to
hop on the phone and talk to the Free Software Foundation directly.
I have met Bradly Kuhn in the past and we have a good relationship, so I
went to him on the issue. Bradly is the VP of the FSF so I know he can
make decisions on the issue.

The issue revolves around a patent involved with gif compression. You
can read the FSF's position here.
http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/gif.html

The patent expires in 2 years, but that is too long to the FSF to be
willing to ignore for our situation. Basicly they had a dead set policy
that GNU software will not include GIF's. Period.

Now this is where we have a real problem, because we use GIF's in phpGW
for most of our images. Now switching most of our images to PNG shouldnt
be a problem, except for the navbar images. Because the navbar images
currently need to be transparent so that themes can switch the colors at
will and have things still look nice.
PNG's support transparency, but the support is not consistant, and in
most browsers the transparant part doesnt work.

There are some work arounds we could try, such as having some fixed
white space around the image, so that thy are all consistant and things
will still look resonable.

The FSF doesnt want to have this become an issue which make phpGW
abandon its status as a GNU project, but are not willing to budge on the
issue.

I would like as much feedback as possible to help figure out what we
should do.

The options I currently see are:

1) Convert to PNG, stay a GNU project and help them fight software
patents with our protest of GIF's

2) Convert to PNG, stay a GNU project but also have someone host a copy
of al the gifs and a script to drop them into place so that they get
used. This would satify the requirement and use a loophole. Not one the
FSF would like, but its an option.

3) Stick with GIF's and leave the GNU project. This means we also have
to leave Savannah.
We could host CVS on phpgroupware.org and setup our own TTS as our bug
tracking tool.

These are the only options I see in this situation. If you have other
suggestions, let us know and please vote.

Seek3r