On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Jan-Peter Homann wrote:
Hello list, hello Bob and Marti
---
I´m just observing the colormanagement market. Actually littleCMS has grown
up to a status, that is comparable or even better than e.g.
- Microsoft ICM
- AppleCMM
- AdobeCMM
- KodakCMM
- EFICMM
It has held this esteemed status for a number of years now.
Now, commercial companies are using it for free, without giving back
something to Marti or the open-source community.
Is using Little CMS for free a problem? It is something that the
license was recently changed to help support.
While there are commercial companies (mySQL was mentioned, but Alladin
Ghostscript, and TrollTech's Qt are other examples) which require
licensing their product for commercial use, Little CMS does not appear
to follow these money-grubbing principles.
The future of littleCMS is clearly in the hand of Marti, because it is his
project, and he wrote more or less 100% of the code. But legal issues can
also be important to projects which are using littleCMS.
Legal issues can certainly be important. Let's take care to not
exchange one legal issue for another. In order for Marti and Little
CMS to be protected by a "foundation" that foundation must be legally
incorporated, with a board of directors, quarterly meetings,
profit/loss statement, audits, etc., and Marti must sign away
ownership of Little CMS to that foundation. By selling Little CMS to
the foundation, Marti is no longer responsible for legal issues
related to Little CMS except for as pertains to his membership in the
foundation. This does not in fact protect users of Little CMS.
5 years later, BEST was selling worldwide the highest quantity of digital
proofing solutions.
One big issue at BEST was the question, which CMM they should licence, that
they are shure, that the owner of the CMM has strong enough patents not to
be suited by EFI or others.
Most open source organizations abhor patents. Patents are the bane of
open source. While it is true that that the "foundation" could file
for many patents (like a large corporation) and have a substantial
arsenal of patents by which they could counter-sue (and would also
have to sue to protect), it is philosophically contrary to the goals
of most open source and public-interest organizations (see
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fighting-software-patents.html and
http://www.eff.org/patent/). It is like an anti-gun organization
heavily arming themselves with guns so that it can fight the
organizations which are pro-gun.
So legal issues concerning littleCMM are also legal issues for projects,
which make use of littleCMS.
Yes, of course. They always will be. As far as patents go there is
nothing to be done about that. The most that can be gained by selling
Little CMS to an umbrella organization is to ensure that any lawsuits
don't impact Marti's pocketbook. However, commercial users of Little
CMS are far more at risk than Marti since they are selling a product.
Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
[EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
