Hi all,

BTW:
- autopano-sift is part of redhat/fedora since Thu 28 Jul 2005.
- autopano-sift-c is part of fedora 8/9
- panotools is not part of Redhat: no license issue there afaik.

I think it is more related to "undiscovered area"  than to legal
restrictions.

Harry



2008/10/23 Harry van der Wolf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

>
>
> 2008/10/23 Yuval Levy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>>
>> Dear Guido and Harry,
>>
>> Guido Kohlmeyer wrote:
>> > Thus Yuv's aproach should be continued.
>>
>> my approach was to look at those who are more experienced and have more
>> resources than me. Red Hat, Novell, Canonical are all large corporations
>> producing popular Linux distributions. Canonical is based in U.K. and
>> AFAIK has nothing that makes it subject to US jurisdiction. Red Hat is
>> 100% US jurisdiction. Novell is an interesting case because it is a US
>> company that bought Suse, an off-shore subsidiary in Germany.
>>
>> All of them have their own lawyers and it can be safely assumed that
>> they are looking at all legal aspects pertinent to their distribution.
>>
>> Latest since the SCO lawsuits it has become clear how important it is to
>> know where the code comes from and what IP rights are attached to it.
>>
>> In an ideal world, those companies have legal compliance processes in
>> place that examine each piece of code before letting it into the
>> distribution. The processes may not be perfect, but they are better than
>> mine simply because they have the necessary resources.
>>
>> None of them includes SIFT code.
>>
>>
>>
>
> The ones you mentioned may not include it in their distro's. Debian
> however, one of the strictest, does include it, and (K)Ubuntu, by now the
> biggest, also includes it.
> Red Hat and Novell do have big commercial interests with "big bugs" license
> contracts, maintenance contracts and support contracts with DELL, IBM,
> HP/Compac and others, where these contracts are expanded to (second line)
> commercial business partners of DELL, IBM, but also resellers and finally
> end-users (customers). Their commercial "part" is the part that keeps them
> alive these days and where they can't take risk. Their lawyers ONLY look at
> their commercial interests and risks and not to the (non interesting and
> risk less) GPL, open source "no bugs generating" part of it.
> That's a huge difference with Hugin and therefore not comparable at all
> (imo).
>
>
>  As soon as Hugin is at the same level as RedHat (or MySQL as another
> example), it might be wise to spend more time to these kind of legal
> aspects.
> I have no fear whatsoever that "The university of British Columbia" will
> ever start a trial at a (commercial) panoVR photographer from the USA,
> using a Hugin "full package" from an Open Source packager. This will not be
> worth the effort (unless this photographer wins the world press photo or
> something like that and maybe even in that case I expect them (UBC) to use
> it as a showcase rather than a case for trial).
> Big businesses or organisations (organizations for USA residents, also
> different here) starting to use a "full package" hugin to generate money for
> their businesses/organisations might be a completely different case for UBC.
>
>
>
> @Guido: I suggested that "my" approach, a derivation of Yuv's
> approach, could be used. In Open Source it's still the packager who more or
> less decides what he/she wants to package (or risk). (And who is uncertain
> what is happening to him/her while he/she is serving the community with only
> the best intents as a volunteer spending many hours for others).
> Also a big difference with RedHat, who deliver "products and services" for
> "mainframe, server, desktop, small/medium/big companies" with the above
> mentioned (big bugs) contracts (and yes also for the non-commercial
> end-user).
> Also Ippei and I interpret things differently when it comes to these
> license cases. We've come to an agreement which we both feel serves us well
> (delivering autopano-sift-c as plugin as a separate, installable package
> within the Hugin package). However, we are both also not 100% happy with the
> situation.
> I am however a fan of Ippei's plugin solution as it gives the packager the
> flexibility and possibility to deliver a hugin and their accompanying
> plugins from one single webpage, but not as one package. This keeps it save
> (next to making it more flexible for the packager to create hugin svn
> packages and occasionally do a CP plugin upgrade).
>
>
> Hoi,
> Harry
>
>
>

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