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From: Ryan Bloom <rbb@covalent.net>
Reply-To: rbb@covalent.net
Organization: Covalent Technologies
To: dev@httpd.apache.org, Justin Erenkrantz <jerenkrantz@ebuilt.com>
Subject: Re: zlib inclusion and mod_gz(ip) recap
Date: Sat, 8 Sep 2001 08:28:24 -0700
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On Saturday 08 September 2001 01:33, Justin Erenkrantz wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 07, 2001 at 09:08:20PM -0700, Ryan Bloom wrote:
> > I also do not believe that we should be making this decision right now. 
> > I am 100% in agreement with Jim about this.  We should table this whole
> > discussion until emotions have calmed, the patent issue has been finally
> > resolved (Dirk told me today that he knows of two patents, and he would
> > post about them), and Apache 2.0 has shipped.
>
> On the zlib main site (http://www.gzip.org/zlib/):
>
> zlib is designed to be a free, general-purpose, legally unencumbered --
> that is, not covered by any patents -- lossless data-compression library
> for use on virtually any computer hardware and operating system.
>
> Not to say that they may not be wrong, but their view seems to be
> that zlib and its algortihms aren't covered by any compression
> patents.  I don't know if this helps at all.  -- justin

Compression isn't the only place that patents can happen that would affect
this.  The patents that Dirk mentioned to me, were for serving content that
was dynamically compressed.  As I said though, I haven't actually read the
patents yet, because I don't have their numbers.  Dirk said he had posted them,
but I can't find it in my mailbox, so I am assuming I deleted it.  He promised to
re-post.

Ryan

______________________________________________________________
Ryan Bloom				rbb@apache.org
Covalent Technologies			rbb@covalent.net
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