Re: Syncing photos

I was referring more to the fact that putting in a file-type checker and
blocking unsupported file-types would be easy, not to the additional
conduits. I was also under the impression that actual new conduits wouldn't
have to be written. A file converter would convert the files to a .pdb
format readable by the program before the sync, and then they would be
synced using the pre-existing file conduit. Yes, the converters would be
complicated to write, but you wouldn't have to deal with any new IO conduits
during the sync itself.

I'm unclear on the legal powers of these file formats. If they can sue us
for using them, why hasn't MS sued Sun/OO.o or Writely (now Google) for use
of the doc format (ooxml is technically open, but the older formats aren't).

On 10/1/07, David A. Desrosiers <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> > A blanket ban won't be hard to do at all, and we can implement
> > converters for other formats as we think of them.
>
> That's not as easy as you might think... not without any documentation
> on the file formats used by these proprietary application vendors, and
> not when these vendors threaten to sue if you release a FLOSS tool
> that can read/deconstruct/reconstruct their proprietary data format.
>
> I ran into this with Kodak several years ago at Palmsource, and one of
> their representatives directly threatened me in front of about 15
> bystanders, when I asked if they wanted to collaborate on writing a
> conduit in pilot-link to extract their images from their image
> database.
>
> > This is definitely something that should be implemented because
> > compiling par and using it are not something newbies want to do. It
> > also doesn't take much new code, so it won't take long.
>
> Every format is completely unique, and every version tends to be just
> as unique. Photos v1.0 is different from Photos v2.0 for example, and
> Photos v1.0 on a Sony device is not the same as Photos v1.0 on a Palm
> device.
>
> It gets complicated when you have to rewrite complete conduit logic
> from scratch, after reverse-engineering every byte-on-the-wire for
> each app and each version.
>
>
> --
> David A. Desrosiers
> [email protected]
> http://projects.plkr.org/
>
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> gnome-pilot-list mailing list
> [email protected]
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>

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