Re: Patent Pending on Sheba arabic Gnome based distribution

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Daniel Veillard <Daniel.Veillard@w3.org> writes:

>  Just found on linux today:
> 
> http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-07-15-027-06-NW-CY-SW
> 
> check the screen shot to see the panel and Gedit with arabic support
> http://www.linuxvision.com/desktop.gif
> 
> -------------------------
> Linuxvision.com has announced the first release of
> "SHEBA" The Complete Arabic Support for Linux. 
> 
> Sheba's features: 
>   .  Supports most Gtk+ and GNOME applications for Arabic input and output. 
> [...]
> -------------------------
> 
>    there is a download link, the first thing is taht they ask for
> registration, second there is a "Patent Pending - July, 2000" notice
> third it seems to be free as in free beer but not free software, seems
> like an activation or download key is required :-(((
> 
>   So what the heck are they doing ?
> I am very concerned about possible attempt to lock up the work on
> porting Gnome to Arabic. Did they provided patches back ? Does someone
> knows what they are doing, especially about the patent, since I can't
> read the arabic story at:
>  http://linux4arab.com/cgi-bin/newspro/viewnews.cgi?newsid963242003,47760,
> 
>   I feel quite concerned,

I'm not so concerned -

 - Even the US patent office won't let you patent "GNOME with Arabic"

 - They have some of their GTK+ and GNOME patches there, and while
   they aren't complete by themeself (they use an external library),
   it's pretty clear that if they want to patent those
   techniques, they can have them.
 
   [ Just so there is no misunderstanding, I'm joking. ]

    - The capabilities there are far less than what Pango
      provides now, not to mention will provide in the future. 

    - The patches are Arabic specific and would never have been folded back 
      into GTK+, even if we didn't have the code already to do it
      right.

It would probably be a good idea if one of our Arabic speakers looked
at the article, and if necessary politely contacted the company to
make sure that they were aware of their obligations under the GPL and
LGPL.

Basically, I'm happy to see someone out there warming the Arabic for
GTK+ and GNOME waters. It will still 6-9 months before we have a
standard version of GNOME with full Arabic support; when we do, I'm
sure this company will switch over to using it.

Regards,
                                        Owen