# libfprint

libfprint is part of the fprint project:
https://fprint.freedesktop.org/

## History

libfprint was originally developed as part of an academic project at the
University of Manchester with the aim of hiding differences between different
consumer fingerprint scanners and providing a single uniform API to application
developers. The ultimate goal of the fprint project is to make fingerprint
scanners widely and easily usable under common Linux environments.

The academic university project runs off a codebase maintained separately
from this one, although I try to keep them as similar as possible (I'm not
hiding anything in the academic branch, it's just the open source release
contains some commits excluded from the academic project).

## License

THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER DOES NOT ENDORSE THIS THIS SOFTWARE RELEASE AND
IS IN NO WAY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CODE CONTAINED WITHIN, OR ANY DAMAGES CAUSED
BY USING OR DISTRIBUTING THE SOFTWARE. Development does not happen on
university computers and the project is not hosted at the university either.

For more information on libfprint, supported devices, API documentation, etc.,
see the homepage:
https://fprint.freedesktop.org/

libfprint is licensed under the GNU LGPL version 2.1. See the COPYING file
for the license text.

Section 6 of the license states that for compiled works that use this
library, such works must include libfprint copyright notices alongside the
copyright notices for the other parts of the work. We have attempted to
make this process slightly easier for you by grouping these all in one place:
the AUTHORS file.

libfprint includes code from NIST's NBIS software distribution:
http://fingerprint.nist.gov/NBIS/index.html
We include bozorth3 from the US export controlled distribution. We have
determined that it is fine to ship bozorth3 in an open source project,
see https://fprint.freedesktop.org/us-export-control.html

## Historical links

Older versions of libfprint are available at:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/fprint/files/

Historical mailing-list archives:
http://www.reactivated.net/fprint_list_archives/

Historical website:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/fprint/
