[Foundation-l] Software Policy Draft

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 9/3/07, Platonides <Platonides at gmail.com> wrote:
[a bunch of fud]

;)  I'm responding to pick your nits, not to disagree over the policy.

[snip]
> Are Pdfs free?

You can't sanely ask that question about "PDF".. PDF is a grab-bag
format which could contain any of dozens of things. They can be
encrypted with DRM.. they can contain program code (in several
different languages and execution models)..

Sometimes PDFs are clearly not free. Sometimes they are gziped postscript.

There are plenty of reasons unrelated to the freedom of the format why
PDF isn't a prefered content for scanned images for us...

> Is Djvu if you need propietary software to get efficient compression? [1]
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6131#c8

The information there is stale. DjVuLibre (GPLed) fully supports both
the c44 and jb2 compression methods.

The commercial applications do have nicer automatic document
segmentation, but all the compression is there in the free code.

[snip]
> Are our dumps equally free without mwdumper (java is free but not
> usable)

Unless mwdumper has changed since I checked, it works fine with gcj.
So even if you want to be very nitpicky about java's status mwdumper
should be fine.