[Djvu-gsdjvu] RE: gsdjvu

[Sommer, J. M, A. <jms...@at...>]

Happy to hear of your progress with DjVu. Unfortunately I would not plan
on seeing AT&T make a release using GPL in the foreseeable future.

Joe

-----Original Message-----
From: Barak Pearlmutter [mailto:ba...@cs...]=20
Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2005 6:43 PM
To: Sommer, Joseph M, ALABS; Frost, Thomas F (Tom), ALABS
Cc: djv...@li...
Subject: gsdjvu

Hi, I'm the Debian developer responsible for packaging the djvu suite
for Debian.  You may not be aware of this, but Debian is the only
distribution of GNU/Linux that actually ships with djvu out of the
box, with the package on our official CDROMs.  It is correctly
integrated into the rest of the system via mime types, the browser
plugins "just work" with no manual configuration, etc.

One constant request I've gotten from my users is to include some good
compressors, so people can transform PDFs and Postscript files to djvu
conveniently.  So I was very happy to hear that AT&T released gsdjvu
under a free license.  I know that the intent in doing this was to
have the code included and working in things like the Debian djvu
packages.

Unfortunately, due to a silly license incompatibility, it looks like
Debian is legally prevented from actually integrating gsdjvu into our
ghostscript package (which is actually named gs-gpl).  So we can't
make the process turn-key so when users install things the gsdjvu
stuff "just works" and provides its functionality.  Instead we could
tell our users to download and recompile etc etc.  But the sort of
defeats the purpose - we try to make things "just work".

So of course, I'm hoping you might be able to release gsdjvu under a
"GPL compatible" license, like the GPL or a dual license CPL/GPL.
This would allow us to actually integrate the code into our
distribution in the fashion that is best for our users, and that would
best encourage use of this technology.

Thanks for your consideration, and thanks again for getting gsdjvu
released under a free license.

					Yours Truly,

					Barak Pearlmutter
<ba...@de...>
--
Prof Barak A. Pearlmutter <ba...@cs...>
 Hamilton Institute & Dept Comp Sci, NUI Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland
 http://www-bcl.cs.nuim.ie/~barak/