Re: Patent Pending on Sheba arabic Gnome based distribution

[Maher Awamy <muhri muhri net>]

I may sound a little harsh:

	It is an ugly hack.
	I hate it.
	I hate the fact that they are making it propietry.
	I will wait for Pango.
	Pango rocks ten times more.
	and sadly, laws in the middleeast are not taken for serious 99% of the
time.
        
	I am really eager to see Pango work so I can have Pronto compose in
arabic and I can communicate with the arabic world again but erm, No thank you
not with that stuff :) Owen, keep up the good work.

Ali, I thought acon was GPL - they cant say its theirs now could they.

Maher

On 16 Jul 2000 18:40:31 -0400, Owen Taylor said:

> 
>  Ali Abdin <aliabdin@aucegypt.edu> writes:
>  
>  > >     - 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.
>  > 
>  > I'd like to point out www.linux4arab.com has nothing to do with this.
>  > linux4arab is just a 'community site' for Arabic-related stuff to Linux - so
>  > they just have a story. The creators/sellers of this 'SHEBA' thing is
>  > www.linuxvision.net
>  
>  [ Sorry for not making that clear ]
>   
>  > I can not see how they are violating or not obligating the GPL/LGPL? If
>  > somebody can give me specific clauses I can contact them regarding that (via
>  > email). As far as I know they make Gtk+/GNOME pathces available, but they sell
>  > their product (not a violation as far as I know). So what is the violation? :)
>  
>  The only concern I would have is that their GTK+/GNOME patches are
>  not, by themselves, complete. The seem to require linking to some
>  other library which is not included in the patches as far as I could
>  see (though I only glanced through the patches.) If that library was
>  proprietary, and then they linked GPL apps against that GTK+, they
>  would be violating the GPL.
>  
>  Of course, from what I could tell, the possible proprietary library 
>  was probably about a days work, so I'm not exactly going to get
>  too worried.
>   
>  > Note: they also add 'other' packages to their 'distro' (such as 'acon' which
>  > is an Arabic console application). What irks me about this though, is that
>  > many people in the Arab community (who are still largely naive about Linux)
>  > will just believe that this company 'created' these products (they seem to
>  > pass it off as if its their creation).
>  >  
>  > > 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.
>   
>  > I would be very happy to see Arabic support too, but not this
>  > way. This is too proprietary and seems inappropriate. This is not
>  > the way I envisioned it at least.
>  > 
>  > I'd much rather wait for 6-9 months than see a few patches to old
>  > gnome-libs/Gtk+ versions in order to get Arabic fonts to render.
>  
>  Well, I'm glad to hear that :-) and I'm sure we'll have something
>  considerably sooner for bleeding edge adopters. But, if other people 
>  want to try out stop-gap solutions, I'm not going to hinder them.
>  
>  Regards,
>                                          Owen
>  
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>  

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