brainstorming: which formats to use and which to avoid

[Werner Koch]

 || On Mon, 11 Jun 2001 12:49:20 +0200
 || piccardi at firenze.linux.it (Simone Piccardi) wrote: 

 sp> The Ogg format (Vorbis and Tarkin) and html are the only data format
 sp> that I know to be patent-free (but I'm not an expert). Probably you

We will never be able to decide whether something is patented; this is
_one_ of the major problems with software patents.  They are written
in a language to cover the real claims.

What we should do is to put formats with known patents claims on a
black list.

What I tried to express in my previous mail was, that even that Ogg is
a free and fully documented format, some vendor might go and add a
proprietary extension to it like Microsoft did it with Kerberos.

Avoiding this pitfall is easy by telling the URL or the RFC of the
specs and warning about possible non-compliat implementations.

Let's keep the patent discussion out except for well-know cases and
concentrate on format defintions.  To start with some formats you just
have to go through the RFC marked as Standards or Draft-Standards.


Hmmm, here are some things which come to mind:


Compression - Whitelist

  ZIP as defined in RFC 1950, 1951, 1952 
  BZIP2 as defined in the documentation (URL)

Compression - Blacklist

  Compress (*.Z) due to the use of the LZW algorithm
  ARR   defined but patented
  PkZip uses patented algorithms

Audio - Whitelist

  WAV as defined by some Micrsoft documentaion 
  Ogg as defined in the documentsion of the software


Audio - Blacklist

  MP3 due to [patent claims by Fraunhofer


Images - Whitelist

  JPEG as defined by the Joint Photographers Expert Group without the
       option for Digital Encoding
  PNG  as defined in RFC????

Images - Blacklist

  GIF  due to the LZW patent and becuase PNG superior to it.
  TIFF because it is a collection of different algorithms


Documents - Whitelist

  Postscript according to Adobe specs xxx
  PDF   according to specs ... but w/o the options ...

Documents - Blacklist

  MS Word  - no complete specification
  Adobe Illustrator - proprietary Postscrip extensions

Vector Graphics - Whitelist

  fig  as specified in the fig documentation
  SVF??? (the Web Vector format) as specified by the W3C 

Vector Graphics - Blacklist

  Flash [I am not sure whether this is sufficiently documented]
  Corel not documented

Character Encodings - Whitelist

  US-ASCII
  UTF-8
  ISO-8859-*

Character Encodings - Blacklist

  ISO646 (?) encodings of some characters depend on the locale
  EBCDIC due to many different variants


Crypto protocols - Whitelist

  OpenPGP ;-)
  Kerberos [but watch out for MS extensions]
  SSH

Digital Signature Certificates - Blacklist

  X.509 - too many different profiles, proprietary extensions or
          widely used wrong implementations.
  PPTP   and many, many other insecure and undocumented protocols.


ciao,

  Werner


-- 
Werner Koch        Omnis enim res, quae dando non deficit, dum habetur
g10 Code GmbH      et non datur, nondum habetur, quomodo habenda est.
Privacy Solutions                                        -- Augustinus