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Question gzip Maven Jean-loup Gailly

Posted by Roblimo on from the picking-the-experts'-brains dept.

Jean-loup Gailly is the author of gzip and, now, CTO for Mandrakesoft, purveyors of Linux-Mandrake. Jean-loup's home page tells you quite a bit about him, including some interesting peeks into his life beyond Linux and open source software. Please try to keep it down to one question per post. Submitted questions will be chosen from the highest-moderated. Answers will appear within the next week.

10 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Why is Mandrake better than Redhat? by emil · · Score: 4

    I guess that you have at least a little something to say about this.

    Is the 586 optimization enough to justify Mandrake's position? Are you especially proud of any of the architectural differences between the distributions (from what I have been told, the Apache-PHP layout is quite a bit different).

    How do feel about the steps that Red Hat has taken to change their distribution in reaction to yours?

  2. What about wavelets? by Tom+Womack · · Score: 4


    The Data Compression Book was an excellent reference when it came out, but there are some hot topics in compression that it doesn't cover - frequency-domain lossy audio techniques (MP3), video techniques (MPEG2 and especially MPEG4), wavelets (Sorenson video uses these, I believe, and JPEG2000 will), and the Burrows-Wheeler transform from bzip.

    Do you have any plans for a new edition of the book, or good Web references for these techniques? BZip is covered well by a Digital research note, but documentation for MPEG2 seems only to exist as source code and I can't find anything concrete about using wavelets for compression. The data is all there on the comp.compression FAQ, but the excellent exposition of the book is sorely lacking.

  3. Go and Compression by Inquisiter · · Score: 4

    When I think of a game like go or chess, I think that each player develops there own algorithm to beat their opponent. If you agree, what relationships or similarities do you see between your intrest in Go and your intrest in compression?

    Inquiring minds want to know.

  4. bzip2 Support by Aaron+M.+Renn · · Score: 5

    When is gzip going to provide (transparent) support for bzip2 files and the Burrows-Wheeler algorithm?

    Will BW be an algorithm option within the gzip file format itself ever?

  5. Compression software by jd · · Score: 5
    It is a "truism" in the Free Software community that code should be released early and released often.

    However, much of the software you've written has started gathering a few grey hairs. Gzip, for example, has been at 1.2.4 for many, many moons, and looks about ready to collect it's gold watch.

    Is compression software in a category that inherently plateus quickly, so that significant further work simply isn't possible? Or is there some other reason, such as Real Life(tm) intruding and preventing any substantial development?

    (I noticed, for example, a patch for >4Gb files for gzip, which could have been rolled into the master sources to make a 1.2.5. This hasn't happened.)

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  6. Winzip by Uruk · · Score: 5

    I noticed that you allowed the people who make the Winzip product to incorporate code written for Gzip. I think it's cool that you did that, because it would be horrible if winzip couldn't handle the gzip format, but at the same time, what are your thoughts about allowing free software code to be included in closed-source products?

    Just out of curiosity, (tell me it's none of my business if you want to and I'll be OK with that) did you receive a licensure fee from the company that makes Winzip for the code?

    --
    -- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
  7. Proprietary algorithms by Tom+Womack · · Score: 5

    The field of compression has been thronged with patents for a long time - but patents at least reveal the algorithm.

    What do you think of the expansion of trade-secret algorithms (MP3 quantisation tables, Sorensen, RealAudio and RealVideo, Microsoft Streaming Media) where the format of the data stream is not documented anywhere?

    Tom

  8. Compression patents by Stephen · · Score: 5

    The compression world has many patents, notably for Lempel-Ziv compression as used in GIF. What is your view on companies patenting non-obvious algorithms for such processes as data compression?

    --
    11.00100100001111110110101010001000100001011010001 1000010001101001100010011
  9. The Data Compression Book by drudd · · Score: 5

    I am a happy owner of The Data Compression Book (2nd Ed). With the increasing availability of compression routines within libraries (Java's GZIP streams spring to mind), does this make your book a little unnecessary?

    Should software authors continue to write their own compression routines, or simply trust the versions available to them in library form?

    I can see some definite advantages to library code, i.e. the ability to upgrade routines, and having standardized algorithms which can be read by any program which utilizes the library.

    Doug

    --
    Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
  10. A question about Mandrake... by Mr.+Penguin · · Score: 5

    As we all know, at first Mandrake was little more than a repackaged version of RedHat. That's changed a bit with the newer versions. My question is this: to what degree will Mandrake continue to differ from RedHat and will there ever be a "developer" version (i.e. one that is centered towards those who are a bit more technically competant)?

    Brad Johnson
    --We are the Music Makers, and we
    are the Dreamers of Dreams

    --
    Brad Johnson