Cool VL Viewer forum

I have recently heard a rumour that LL will stop supporting all of their GPL viewers and will also require all TPV's to stop using the GPL licensed versions of the KDU? If this is true, how will it affect Cool VL Viewer ? How soon before we can get our hands on a retrofitted, Snowstorm-based viewer with the much easier to use/navigate 1.x UI ?

The Cool VL Viewer is based on GPLed code, namely the official sources for LL's viewer v1.23.5 and Snowglobe v1.5. There is no licensing issue and the LGPL license is only for the Snowstorm project (but it won't be an issue either).

The Cool VL Viewer can make use of KDU (and FMOD, and Vivox, etc), but this library (and other non-GPL licensed libraries) are *not* distributed with it. Instead, the user has to install the official viewer and then the GPL binaries of the Cool VL Viewer over it. Note that even when not officially supported anymore by LL, old viewers binaries do stay available for download (see this page), so there is no risk of being suddenly unable to install the Cool VL Viewer.

This distribution model also solves the licensing issues (there is nothing preventing a GPL binary to use an non-GPL library, as long as the latter was obtained in a legit (and legal) way).

Some other TPVs used to be distributed with or to download the licensed libraries, which is in violation of their license. The Cool VL Viewer is not affected by this problem.

Henri,

according to Oz Linden even the ability to use a libllkdu copied from their oifficial binaries already violates their licenses.

I made a patch that strips out all KDU support from snowglobe, if you want it you can get it here: http://dolphinviewer.eregion.de/wp-cont ... okdu.patch

I compared the speed and quality of a snowglobe build without KDU and my previous version of dolphin with KDU, and frankly I don't see why there should be any need to use KDU... same speed, same quality...

cheers,

LC

Oz says a lot of stupid things... alas.

In any case, *I* do not violate any license by distributing the Cool VL Viewer like I do now and always did, and should *you* be worried about violating the KDU license, you can simply delete the library from your viewer installation directory, and the viewer will then automatically fall back to the (slower) OpenJPEG library: there is no need for any patch.