[Fedora-legal-list] jai-imageio-core license questions

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Fri, 2008-12-05 at 17:48 -0500, Adam Goode wrote:

> I assume jj2000 can't go in to Fedora. I filed a Sun bugreport about
> this BSD confusion, but they are quiet on it. Am I wrong? Can jj2000 go
> in? (It would be useful.) Would I just need to strip jj2000 out of this
> package to make it ok for Fedora?

For two reasons, jj2000 can't go into Fedora:

1. The license it is under is non-free (only "JJ2000 Partners" have
right to use, there is no right to modify, heavy use restrictions based
on standard compliance).
2. JPEG 2000 is heavily patent mined.

You'd need to strip jj2000 out of the source tarball and ship a "clean"
tarball to make it okay for Fedora.

Sun is historically really bad at licensing issues like this, although
recently, they seem to be at least more interested in resolving these
issues. Unfortunately, the patent issues around JPEG 2000 mean that even
if this code was under an acceptable license, we still couldn't ship it.

~spot