Sony STR-DA3700ES Software License Information page 56

it (which includes writing anything derived
from it), you must distribute source code for
your copy or derivation and propagate the
same restriction to people who would copy
your derivation. In other words, the price the
author wants for the use of his proprietary
work is your contribution to the free software
cause.
One component prohibits you from selling it
or using it in a commercial way: hpcdtoppm.
Some components are contributed to the
public domain.
The copyrights on individual components of
this package are detailed at appropriate places
within the package.
PATENTS
-------
These are the patents the Netpbm maintainer
knows about that relate to Netpbm. It is
basically just information the maintainer has
stumbled over at some point -- no search has
been done.
No licenses have been granted by patent
owners to the maintainer of Netpbm.
Therefore, if you need a patent to use
something in Netpbm, you need your own
license.
A note about patents in general: A patent gives
an inventor the exclusive right to make, sell, or
use the invention. If you independently invent
something without knowing that the patent
holder already did, that makes no difference --
the patent holder still has the exclusive right. It
makes no difference if you give the original
inventor credit. The patent applies to a method,
not its expression, so writing a program from
scratch to implement a certain method is still a
patent infringement. Infringing a patent is not
a crime per se, but to the extent that it costs the
patent holder money, the infringer has to make
it up.
The original purpose of patents is probably
perverted when patents are applied to things
you implement in computer programs. This is
56
one of the Free Software Foundation's causes.
See
<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy.html#laws>.
Unisys owns a patent on LZW compression,
which is used by ppmtogif, and maybe on
LZW decompression, which is used by
giftoppm. IBM also owns a patent that may
cover the GIF tools. Unisys offers a license of
the patent for trivial use for $5000. Its patent
expires in 2003.
Neither company has ever enforced the patent
against trivial users of it. <http://
news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-
1713278.html> is an article dated April 18,
2000 on the issue.
<http://www.unisys.com/unisys/lzw/> is
Unisys' view of the matter.
For information from another perspective, see
<http://burnallgifs.org>.
The following Netpbm components may be
restricted by this patent: ppmtogif, giftopnm.
A good substitute for GIF if the patents are a
problem is PNG (see pngtopnm, pnmtopng),
which was developed with a primary purpose
of not using any patented technology.
You can also use the -nolzw option on
ppmtogif to avoid using the LZW patent. The
images so generated are larger than traditional
LZW-compressed GIFs, but any GIF decoder
can decode them just the same.
The jbigtopnm and pnmtojbig programs use
arithmetic coding patents and other patents
covering various aspects of the "front end."
libpopt
Copyright (c) 1998 Red Hat Software
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to
any person obtaining a copy of this software
and associated documentation files (the
"Software"), to deal in the Software without
restriction, including without limitation the
rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the
Software, and to permit persons to whom the