Sony STR-DA3700ES Software License Information - Page 56

it (which includes writing anything derived from it), you must distribute source code for your copy or derivation and propagate the same restriction to people who would copy your derivation. In other words, the price the author wants for the use of his proprietary work is your contribution to the free software cause. One component prohibits you from selling it or using it in a commercial way: hpcdtoppm. Some components are contributed to the public domain. The copyrights on individual components of this package are detailed at appropriate places within the package. PATENTS ------- These are the patents the Netpbm maintainer knows about that relate to Netpbm. It is basically just information the maintainer has stumbled over at some point -- no search has been done. No licenses have been granted by patent owners to the maintainer of Netpbm. Therefore, if you need a patent to use something in Netpbm, you need your own license. A note about patents in general: A patent gives an inventor the exclusive right to make, sell, or use the invention. If you independently invent something without knowing that the patent holder already did, that makes no difference -the patent holder still has the exclusive right. It makes no difference if you give the original inventor credit. The patent applies to a method, not its expression, so writing a program from scratch to implement a certain method is still a patent infringement. Infringing a patent is not a crime per se, but to the extent that it costs the patent holder money, the infringer has to make it up. The original purpose of patents is probably perverted when patents are applied to things you implement in computer programs. This is one of the Free Software Foundation's causes. See . Unisys owns a patent on LZW compression, which is used by ppmtogif, and maybe on LZW decompression, which is used by giftoppm. IBM also owns a patent that may cover the GIF tools. Unisys offers a license of the patent for trivial use for $5000. Its patent expires in 2003. Neither company has ever enforced the patent against trivial users of it. is an article dated April 18, 2000 on the issue. is Unisys' view of the matter. For information from another perspective, see . The following Netpbm components may be restricted by this patent: ppmtogif, giftopnm. A good substitute for GIF if the patents are a problem is PNG (see pngtopnm, pnmtopng), which was developed with a primary purpose of not using any patented technology. You can also use the -nolzw option on ppmtogif to avoid using the LZW patent. The images so generated are larger than traditional LZW-compressed GIFs, but any GIF decoder can decode them just the same. The jbigtopnm and pnmtojbig programs use arithmetic coding patents and other patents covering various aspects of the "front end." libpopt Copyright (c) 1998 Red Hat Software Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the 56