[Gdal-dev] JPEG Patent and GDAL

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

A client of mine that incorporates GDAL in its software products has
received a letter from lawyers representing a firm claiming to hold
patents which use of the JPEG format infringes.  While I doubt that the
claims have merit in law, my client is taking the prudent step of removing
JPEG support from their products.   Others may wish to do the same.

Pursuiant to that I have verified that GDAL can be easily built with the
configure option "--without-jpeg" to ensure that the JPEG software is not
included.  This also automatically removes JPEG support from the libtiff
component *if* you are using the internal version of libtiff.  If you want
to ensure this the case use "--with-libtiff=internal" when configuring.

On Windows, I added the JPEG_SUPPORTED macro in the nmake.opt file.  Comment
this line out to disable JPEG support in a build.

I will continue to distribute OpenEV builds, and other GDAL builds with
JPEG support for the time being, but I want to at least make it easy to
remove the support.

For those wanting more information on the JPEG patent issue, there is some
material on the http://www.jpeg.org/ web site.

Best regards,

-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent