lzma (Re: HEADS UP: upgrading ImageMagick to 6.4.0-6)

[Brooks Davis]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 10:35:30PM -0400, Mikhail Teterin wrote:
> ???????? 15 ??????? 2008 10:21 ??, Brooks Davis ?? ????????:
> > Sadly, the author's licensing terms will limit the adoption of lzma.
> > The BSD license is well established as the most restrictive acceptable
> > license for successful, widely adopted compression schemes.
> 
> Ever seen the inside of gzip.c (the original)? General Public License is 
> certainly more restrictive than BSD's and yet we (and just about everyone 
> else under the sun) had it in the tree until very recently, when a direct 
> client of libz was imported.

The fact that a licensing compromsise was once made in the face of an
extremely poor competitor (compress not only performs badly on text,
it significantly expands files gzip and bzip are perfectly capable of
compressing) is largely irrelevent.  The reality is that the significant
improvements provided by lzma will be relegated to a niche until
an implementation under a BSD-like license is available.  Even RMS
acknoledges this effect

http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3

I wouldn't necessicairly be opposed to seeing support for tar.lzma files
in bsd.port.mk, but I don't think lzma has a signficant future if the
licensing policy remains as is (i.e. complex and not clearly defined in
the source files).

-- Brooks
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