Oh, another matter that seems obvious to me, yet hasn’t been plainly stated is the following.
In the event of legal trouble, the action would be between Tech Giants. The plaintiff would likely somebody like Canon or Apple and the defendant would be somebody like IBM (owners of RedHat) or EQT (owners of Suse).
In this thread, I discussed the conditions under which I would accept a PR to provide support for ISOBMFF in Exiv2 Add support for ISOBMFF Files (AVIF, HEIF, CR3) · Issue #1229 · Exiv2/exiv2 · GitHub The conditions are:
- Nobody provides a strong reason to say STOP.
- The PR builds on all supported platforms and passes the existing test suite.
- The PR extends the test suite to test the newly supported formats.
- The PR has a build switch to enable/disable the feature.
- The PR does not require Exiv2 to call a library.
- The PR Includes appropriate documentation updates.
- The author of the PR agrees to support users and fix issues in the code for 2 years on both the 0.27-maintenance and master branches.
The next maintainer of Exiv2 doesn’t need to accept my conditions. However there are designed to minimize the risk of litigation. In particular the build switch is intended for the use by the Linux distros.
From my personal point of view, it seems bizarre that I can be sitting in my home office in England and be expected to:
- Research, develop and document the necessary C++ code.
- Solve an insoluable legal issue.
The other organisations discussed: The Linux Community, Apple, Canon, IBM, EQT have more resources and provided no assistance.
Presumably, the CEO at IBM gets daily briefings and of very high priority is: “What is Robin doing about ISOBMFF in Exiv2?”. IBM could be bankrupted by a huge legal challenge from Apple caused by my 300 lines of C++.
I’d like to thank @kmilos for contributing code to Exiv2 concerning Tiff-EP Support and to upgrade the code base to support DNG 1.5. I enjoyed working with you.