[Insight-users] Patented code in ITK?

Gavin Baker gavinb+xtk at cs . mu . OZ . AU
Wed, 11 Jun 2003 22:23:54 +1000


Hello,

It has been brought to my attention that there may exist some patented code
in ITK; specifically mentioned was itk::BinaryMask3DMeshSource.

To verify, I grepped the entire ITK source tree.  The only occurence of the
word 'patent'was in README.html, which simply states that any patented code
will appear in the Insight/Code/Patented directory.  This directory does not
exist in the source tarball, is empty in CVS, and I can see no other
indication that any code is covered by a patent.  A google search similarly
yielded no results.

Can we please have an official answer on the following:

- Does there exist any patented code in ITK?
- If so, which classes/files?
- What are the licensing conditions?
- What is the policy for including patented code in ITK?
- What is the policy for identifying patented code in ITK?

I need to resolve these issues for the Debian packaging, though I'm sure the
issue is widely relevant.

Thanks,

  :: Gavin

-- 
Gavin Baker                                Computer Vision Lab (CVMIL)
http://www . cs . mu . oz . au/~gavinb                 University of Melbourne