[CREATE] on reverse engineering, patents and stuff

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

Hi,

Yesterday Craig Bradney aka MrB asked on #scribus, whether including
code for importing CDR files into main Scribus code might cause legal
issues.

You might already know that back in 2004 or so one of Scribus's
developers was already contacted by Quark guys who literally stopped
him from publishing QuarkXPress importer that was in works. IMO,
giving proprietary guys even a tiny chance to sue one of our
developers should never occur.

Thus two questions.

1. Did you ever discuss such legal issues with regards to Scribus,
Inkscape and GIMP projects with lawyers? I know that Open Font Library
has some contacts in this area since recently (Jon, please prove me
wrong if I am :)) and that Creative Commons has lawyers. Could we
possibly organize a good talk on this?

2. If we know for sure that there will be problems, what do you think
about at least hosting problematic code (CDR, INDD etc. importers) on
a server located in Russia or some other country free of the scary
patents/IP stuff? Does Scribus have plug-in infrastructure that would
allow installing binary/python importer/exporter plug-ins as addition
to usual installation? Then we could probably organize a repository
for different distributions similar to the one Peter Linnell does for
SuSE.

One of the reasons I'm starting this discussion is that Igor and
Valentin are up to reverse engineering more file formats after they
are done with CDR, and we probably do want supporting legacy data for
those who migrates to open source applications.

P.S. Valentin, Igor and Simon -- I'm not sure you are on the list,
thus the carbon copy.

Alexandre