Batik is currently preparing for a release (be that 1.5.1 or 1.6). Former Batik releases simply contained a fop-transcoder.jar without having been released properly. That's why I'm now calling for a formal vote for a release of our transcoders. The only thing we do is tag CVS HEAD, we don't publish the code ourselves. That also means that we're not talking about releasing the whole codebase here, only the transcoders plus their dependencies in our codebase (PDF lib, PS support code, fonts and images). When the vote passes this tag must be used by the Batik team to create their release. This should ensure that the Batik release contains only clean code (meaning without known IP issues and other showstoppers).
This will be the last Batik release before we reorganize our two codebases to create the XML Graphics Commons area. Jeremias Maerki