[Digikam-devel] HDphoto support using porting kit from M$...

[Mikolaj Machowski]

Dnia środa 04 kwiecień 2007, Gilles Caulier napisał:
> Hi all,
>
> If you following the photograhy world news, you have certainly seen than
> M$ have created since one year a new file format named HDPhoto...
>
> The picture file is based on TIFF. It support Exif/IPTC/XMP/ICC
> profiles. This file format is supported by default into M$ Vista and the
> future Adobe Photoshop CS3.
>
> M$ provide a porting kit witch can be compiled under Linux !
>
> And yes it compile fine here. I have just fixed one line in a C file
> (:=))) and moved the Makefile at the right place. The kit provide the
> shared lib raries to encode/decode/read metadata from HDPhoto files, and
> 2 command line tools like backend of libraries...
>
> Of course, this porting kit license is special (:=))). Achim i promise
> you some long white night to read the M$ EULA. Without to have read the
> paper, i'm sure it not compatible as well with open-source world (it's
> not GPL/BSD like)... But i recommend to read the wikipedia page before
> to take too fast conclusion :
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Photo
>
> More informations about HDPhoto can be found here :
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/wmphoto/
>
> My personnal tarball fixed to compile under linux is here :
>
> http://digikam3rdparty.free.fr/misc.tarballs/hdphoto-porting-kit-linux.t
>ar.gz
>
> Uncompress the tarball, go to HDPhoto folder, and start "make all"...
> That all...
>
> What do you think about ?
>
> Gilles
>
> Note: Please this is not a troll. Stay constructive (:=)))...

Following discussion from Wiki and linked pages looks like MS verbally
promised putting HD Photo specs under Open Promise but in official page
of aforementioned Open Promise HD Photo isn't mentioned. This is one
problem.

Second problem I see: two points in EULA:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=285eeffd-d86c-48c3-ab93-3abd5ee7f1ce&displaylang=en

    2a

    You may permit distributors of your Licensed Products to copy and
    distribute the Distributable Code as part of your Licensed Products,
    provided that your distributors are legally prohibited from
    modifying, and do not modify, the Distributable Code and/or the
    Licensed Product in a manner that causes the Licensed Product (or
    any third party product in which the Licensed Product is
    incorporated) to become non-compliant or incompatible with the HD
    Photo 1.0 file format (a.k.a. the Windows Media Photo 1.0 file
    format) as defined in the specification(s) provided in the software.

There is no way you can prohibit such changes in code.

    2c

    modify or distribute the source code of any Distributable Code so
    that any part of it becomes subject to an Excluded License. An
    Excluded License is one that requires, as a condition of use,
    modification or distribution, that

While you can retain separate license for several files what about
binaries? And more important - inclusion of such files can delegate
Digikam to second class citizen status in distros like Debian. IMHO it
is not worth it.

Partial solution could be provide some hooks in Digikam for displaying
of HDP files when some executable is available, plus links for
downloading sources/even binaries but it should not be included in core
Digikam.

m.