Re: [Phpgroupware-developers] The GIF issue

[Dan Kuykendall (Seek3r)]

Loic Dachary wrote:
> 
>         I wonder if there was a vote of phpGroupWare leaders to become
> part of the GNU project ? If that was the case, what you suggest is that
> noone in phpGroupWare was aware of what it means to become part of the GNU
> project ? Or that they were fooled on purpose and that the GNU project
> waited to be in a position to *impose* the rules that, all of a sudden,
> were revealed ?

We did consider what it meant to be part of GNU and what GNU stood for.
We did vote on the matter, and discussed in in length.
I think the issue Mark was talking about was the gif issue. Other than
the GIF issue we have worked hard to comply with the ideals of the FSF
and GNU.

>         I must admit that I'm a bit lost. I'd rather shut up and let
> you decide. For the record, when I decided to submit my software to
> the GNU project I did some extensive research of what it means, what
> it implies. I discussed the various issues, I was fully aware (hard
> not to be) that it implies ethical & moral issues, that GNU boycotts
> GIFs, that GNU works hard to build software 100% based on Free
> Software avoiding dependencies to proprietary software etc. All these
> informations are publicly avaiable and were relayed by the press many
> times. I thought carefully if that matched my own beliefs and then
> decided to join.  Afterwards I spent (and still do) my energy to
> support and enforce the GNU policy, helping it evolve when needs be.

I also thought long and hard about joining GNU and I can tell from the
discussions the team had, that many of them did as well.
But from the way things read on the gif issue from both the gif page on
GNU.org and in a brief discussion with Bradley I was not lead to believe
that we could not even include GIF files in our cvs tree and releases.

I knew that we couldnt have gifs as a required part of our program, so I
spent some time writing a set of image functions that make phpGW able to
use PNG files instead of gifs by tweaking the generated HTML files. All
that needed to be done was to put in a few minuted to create png copies
of all the gif files. Then if someone deleted all the gifs by doing a
simple find and rm, phpgroupware shouldnt flinch, but start serving up
the PNG files right away.

This was some of the text I saw about the gif file issue:

"For example, the GIF file format is covered by the LZW software patent
in the USA. For this reason, you should not include GIFs in the web
pages for your package, nor in the distribution of the package itself. A
GNU package might provide support for GIFs; however, precedence should
always be given to PNGs, JPGs, and other patent-unencumbered image
formats. (More about the GNU project's opposition to GIFs is available
at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html.)"

It uses the words "you should not inlcude GIF's in..." it does *not* say
"you cannot" or "you shall not". It says "should not", which implies an
option. It also says that "a package might provide support for GIFs;
however, precendence should always be given to PNG...". Since I wrote
the functions to look for PNG, then JPG and finally GIF, I felt I was
fulfilling this as well.

I also know that we are not infringing on the gif patent in any way,
because we are only using and distributing gifs. The patent only
requires that software that creates gifs must have a license to the
patent. Since our images have either been found on other websites or
created by someone on the team that didnt mind creating GIF's. phpGW
does not itself create any image files.

I have spent time and energy on GNU issues and believe in what they are
doing. I think that software patents are very bad and that they should
be fought. I think that the patent on GIF files was a bad thing, but
since the patent ends in 2 years and the patent holders (from my
knowledge) havent been too much of a pain, I dont think its worth that
much attention. It is also not something I am willing to hurt
phpGroupWare for. I think that the FSF is taking this too extreme if
they wont allow us to simply include GIF's in our project and after much
debate with the leadership team we have decided not to follow this
request. If that means that we cannot be a GNU Project, then we are
willing to deal with that, but I rather hope that the FSF will re-think
their view on the simple act of inlcuing GIFs (not requiring, just
inlcuding) in our project instead of having to ask us to leave the GNU
Project entirely.

Dan Kuykendall