[Insight-developers] ITK/SZIP license incompatibility?

[Cory Quammen]

SZIP is used by HDF5 which has recently been integrated into ITK.

Working on another project, I read the SZIP license, copied from their
webpage (http://www.hdfgroup.org/doc_resource/SZIP/) below:

The version of Szip distributed with HDF products is free for
non-commercial use, which may occur in two sets of circumstances:
Non-commercial users may use the Szip software integrated with HDF
products to both encode (compress) and decode (uncompress) data. This
applies to educational and research applications.
Commercial users may use the software to decode any data. Further,
they may use the software in internal activities that do not involve
or result in the development of an Szip-based software product.
Commercial licenses are available for commercial users who wish to
distribute an Szip-based software product or engage in commercial uses
that are not allowed above. For further licensing information or to
view a copy of the Szip copyright statement, see Commercial use terms
and the copyright and license notice pertaining to Szip in HDF
products.

The full copyright and license statement is available here:
http://www.hdfgroup.org/doc_resource/SZIP/Commercial_szip.html

My understanding is that this is incompatible with the ITK license.
Worse, SZIP contains code encumbered by several patents (listed in the
copyright and license statement above).

Thoughts?

Cory

-- 
Cory Quammen
Research Associate
Department of Computer Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~cquammen