What about GIFLIB?

[Jake Hamby]

Hi,

I just downloaded Kaffe 1.0b1 and it seems to be quite usable on Linux. 
On Solaris/SPARC, I had less luck getting it to run properly, but I'll try
to track down my problems some more before reporting a bug.

Anyway, it's unfortunate that the current class library doesn't support
GIF images.  I understand the reasoning behind this, but would there be
any legal problems with using GIFLIB, if installed on the user's machine?
According to the README, because it was written before 1995, it is
grandfathered in under UniSys's license terms and you don't have to pay
fees for using it.  It's also included with many UNIX distributions,
including RedHat Linux, and as a FreeBSD package.

I'll probably work on integrating this into Kaffe myself, and I'll release
the patches when I'm finished.  Hopefully there won't be any legal issues
with integrating such changes into Kaffe.  Certainly the configure script
can check if GIFLIB is installed and use it if present, or continue with
the present behavior if not.  I'm not a lawyer, but I doubt there would be
any legal problems with this approach, right?

-Jake