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phoboslab / qoi

The “Quite OK Image Format” for fast, lossless image compression
MIT License
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Question about QOI license #206

Closed killua-killua closed 2 years ago

killua-killua commented 2 years ago

QOI is great. The behavior of touching every pixel only once is not just decreasing the theoretical time complexity, actually, it's critical for those embedded system with external RAM. Reducing the number of RAM access times, this really means a lot, at the hardware level.

I have some question about QOI. Is QOI totally free? If I use this new format in a project, should I be careful about something like patent or license. I knew this codec repo is MIT license, but I am not sure if the QOI format itself is something like this.

phoboslab commented 2 years ago

Yes, QOI is completely free. No patents or licenses.

On the qoiformat.org it's mentioned that the spec is "released as public domain under the CC0 License". Maybe I should add a note about patents, too? How do other free codecs clarify that they are "free"?

killua-killua commented 2 years ago

Oh, I didn't notice the CC0 license there, and it seems enough to clarify QOI is "free". Thanks for your answer.