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Unisys Cracks The Whip
Their GIF patent expires in 2003, so Unisys is
getting while the getting's good, according to CNET.
They're not commenting on the record, but it seems they'll be kicking up their licensing fees. According to one source, they asked Accuweather for US$3.8million. Instead, AccuWeather forecasts switching to
PNG
next month (insert sound effect of
burning GIFs.)
Update: 04/19 09:44 by J : I just checked the bug log for Mozilla's lack of PNG alpha transparency (which has been registered and debated for over a year, and which I gather is the major factor standing between Mozilla and PNG compliance).
Three days ago, after a little tweaking, Greg Roelofs reported significant progress on the latest build:
http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngs-img-moz.html
It's gorgeous! Aside from the interlacing bug (bug 3195), it's the equal of MacIE 5.0. Well done, Tim and Pam! It's truly a lovely thing to behold. I look forward to seeing this bug closed out at last.
The funny thing is that AccuWeather, in response, sent the Unisys CEO a 50 MB GIF of an altered satellite image of a hand with a middle finger covering the western part of the US. The caption at the bottom said "Blow Us."
= )
The question right now is when will we see .PNG file display and printing support in the major commercial web browsers?
.PNG files correctly, but printing is another matter (Microsoft is aware of this matter (there is a KnowledgeBase article about this); they may issue a patch or library file update to fully support .PNG files).
It's likely that Netscape 6.0 (the final release version) will have it, and I think Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows 95/98/NT4/2000 may have it also. IE 5.01 will display
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
funny on this article. Everyone is bitching "we need PNG support in our browsers" yet I haven't seen one person say they had contributed some code to a PNG project or to Mozilla or anything. Is it me or are there more people complaining and less people actually doing things? We all know PNG support is needed in browsers and yes we also know slashdot still uses GIFs. If all the current browsers supported PNG, slashdot could switch over to them and there would be no problem. If you want PNG support tell the programmers of the browser you particularly like, offer to help them test it out or maybe help with some code or something. I'm not a very good programmer but whenever I can I'll try to help out on a project, closed or not. It's like everyone loves watching PBS but no one is giving any money to big bird.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/gif2png/
No, it does not restrict you to 256 colors. That limit came about back when the best graphical displays were 256 colors and indexed, and happened to match up exactly with the number of colors GIF could encode in a single image block. So the practice came about to use exactly one image block for a whole GIF image. There is nothing preventing you from using multiple image blocks (without the animation extension which isn't part of the official GIF standard). IE 3-5, NS 3-4, Opera, and Mozilla all display things correctly (IE fails to print correctly).
There are plenty of reasons not to use GIF, but a limit of 256 colors is not one of them. Such limits exist only in those programs (the majority, unfortunately) that implemented GIF by reusing tired old code over and over from the 256 color display days (e.g. 1989).
You can see non-compressed and true-color GIFs here and get free GPL non-LZW code to produce your own here.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It just dawned on me. Unisys and AccuWeather are competing providers of weather data, such as value added weather radar feeds. So my suspicion is that this may be more than just trying to get huge royalties. It may also be to try and cripple a competitor. I didn't see any mention of this in the CNET article, but I think it's important enough to bring up. It may even be relevant and further show why so many patents are really bad tools to put in the hands of business. It could help explain why they wanted so much from AccuWeather.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Why doesn't /. take some of it's own advice and burn some of it's GIFs? ;)
g if f g if
GIFs from the front page:
http://images.slashdot.org/title.gif
http://images.slashdot.org/greendot.gif
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicmozilla.
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topichumor.gi
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicprivacy.
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicbe.gif
etc...
--
GroundAndPound.com News and info for martial artists of all styles.
GIF is pretty simple to implement (compared to JPEG or PNG at least).
I disagree. PNG is at least as easy to implement as GIF or JPEG with the libpng library. It is available as source, compiles out of the box for just about any platform. The license is very unrestrictive -- similar to the BSD license.
Some postings here said that folks are glad PNG doesn't have animation support, but I'm afraid one has to see it from the other side -- as long as there is no MNG support (which is a format for animation and has some things in common, see http://www.cdrom.com/pub/mng/) everywhere, GIF will stay. Web site creators want animations, and they want their stuff to display on most people's browsers, so they will take GIF. They don't give a damn about Unisys' behaviour, they paid for their software (probably ;-)) and they want to get things done.
The only way to really let GIF die (IMHO) is to create a free MNG library that can be easily included everywhere (like libpng) and put it into all free or semi-free browsers like Netscape, kfm, whatever. Once web site creators start using it, users will ask for MNG support (Ma, the animation doesn't display!) and IE will have it as well. Best thing would be a free GIMP-like animation editor...
So I have this graphics library for novice programmers I have developed. I recently begain work on a new version, and many of my users have request GIF support. I've mostly told them that PNG is really what they want, but to give myself more ammunition, I actually decided to see if I could get Unisys to give me a license for using LZW in my library.
As my library is freely available and the entire project is non-profit, I figured I might be able to get a license at no cost, as the Unisys page on LZW implies this is possible. So I e-mail off my license request. They send me back a questionaire about the nature of my software. I fill out and send it back. They e-mail me back, saying yeah we can license it to you for a fee, just tell us where to fax the forms. I reiterate the non-profit nature of my software and ask just how much the licensing fee actually is. They e-mail back 5000$, and that a) they can't license it to me anyway as they are only allowed to license to companies, not individuals and b) that users of my library, in order to be legal, would also need to license their use of LZW seperately (most likely for another 5000$).
So there you have it. Unisys is evil and this damn patent nonsense must stop.
I can think of a couple of "interesting" ways to help this catch 22 situation. Write a clever squid plugin to do one of the following: (and get as mand people as possible to install it.)
1) A squid (or other www proxy) plugin that converts all pngs it encounters to uncompressed gifs on the fly, allowing all browsers to see the images, but also allowing web developers to start using pngs now without worrying. Once browsers catch up, the new plugin can be deleted.
2) A squid plugin that converts all gifs to pngs. Meaning nobody will be able to see any images and pressure will increase on the browser developers to improve png support.
Okay, so point 2 wasn't serious, but point 1 _could_ help if enough people did it.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
LZW is a general purpose adaptive compression algorithm that can achieve the information theoretic maximum compression for a suitable source. It is based on LZ78 by Lempel and Ziv (IEEE trans. on inf. theory in -78) and modified by Welch (IEEE computer, sometime in the 80's)
The basic idea is to keep an indexed dictionary of strings seen so far (initially contains the alphabet) and then encode the index of the longest string that can be found in the dictionary starting from the current position. Then a new string consisting of the found string and the first unknown symbol (ie. not a suffix to the string) is inserted into the dictionary. So it is basically a method of replacing a string with a single symbol which references the dictionary (thus the name dictionary methods for LZ77 and LZ78). There are a number of modifications to this algorithm, for instance freezing the dictionary and flushing it at certain intervals... in practice the strings could be stored in a trie (you read right: a trie, not tree, but trie is a kind of tree).
LZW is old, nowadays people should use arithmetic coding (which is nearly information theoretically optimal in practice). IMO arithmetic coding and statistical modeling is the way to go. Basically you've got the best engine room possible (arithmetic coding) and then the problem is to add the intelligence (statistical modeling). BTW from what I gather arithmetic coding is also patented, but I don't give a fsck since I live in Europe... AC is pretty old, but it is based on an unpublished work by Elias... so finding prior art might be possible.
Jean Louis-Gassée highlighted this during an interview with Nightly Business Report yesterday. He was talking about trying to compete against Windows and mentioned Linux. "Why can't you walk into any store an buy a computer with an operating system other than Windows? Or a dual-boot configuration with Linux, Linux is totally free, so why isn't it more available?" (I'm paraphrasing horribly, so that may not be an exact quote.)
/. he was talking to a bunch of stock brokers, CIOs, and suit-wearing Warren Buffet wannabes. And they don't buy computers from the same places you do. What he meant is being able to walk into any random BestBuy and picking up a computer with Linux installed.
The point he was trying to make is a) it's damn near impossible to break into the PC OS market and b) just because something is free of cost doesn't mean it's going to immediately smother the other expensive options.
#include <std_freebeer_freespeech.h>
PS. Okay, yeah, we all know the zillions of places you can buy computers with Linux installed, or FreeBSD or some multi-boot variation. But he wasn't talking to
PPS. Of course, the real enemy is NS and MS for putting piss-poor PNG support in their browsers. If they had done it right back when PNG was introduced, or at least in the 4.0 browsers when they had no excuse but their own laziness, and Unisys had already been making a fuss about the patent, so everyone knew that GIF was a dead-end. Not to mention the nerve-grating limitations of GIF. And you'd think that, in the heat of the "browser wars" someone would point out how much of a selling point full PNG support could be. But NOOOOO, It was more important to have fancy animated buttons! And adding all these ridiculous panes so we could all browse in a tiny window with an effective size of a postage stamp, which is entirely filled with an ugly, flashing, patented, animated GIF! AAARRRGGHHH!!!!
But then, maybe we should encourage Unisys. All those banner ad mongers will find that it's no longer cost-effective to pollute our screens with their bloated, garish, animated crap. Unisys could license all the banner ads off of the internet. Woo-Hoo!
(off to take my medicine)
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
Right now, GIFs and JPGs are the only image formats that are reliably supported across browsers, platforms, yada yada yada. Since the features of the two formats are different, using gifs is impossible to get around in some cases (like when transparency is needed). I would switch to PNGs in a heartbeat (for several reasons) if I knew they would appear the way I designed them to look.
I don't think support for PNGs will become a priority for browser vendors until enough sites use them, but until the browser support is there, all those sites are potentially disfigured. There's no way I can tell a client I'm going to use an image format that might mess up their webpage. It's a catch-22, and browser developers are the ones best situated to get out of it. All that to say, PNG support needs to made a priority now.
As far as "political" considerations go, using GIFs has always been a little distasteful, but it wasn't as big an issue as it is now. Now that Unisys is pressing the issue, it't time to leave the GIF format behind.
www.code-fix.com
Yes, there is a very good reason to delay before they start charging licensing fees. If they had gone after the first person to use GIF (well, LZW), then the GIF file format would have never caught on. For a software developer, the value of supporting a file format is a function of how widely supported that file format is. So the software developers weigh the benefit of supporting some file format (# of people who want it), versus the cost of implementing it (time to code, licensing fees).
GIF is pretty simple to implement (compared to JPEG or PNG at least). So if Unisys doesn't bother enforcing the patent at first, a lot of people will pick GIF as their standard format. Then, once everyone is using GIF, and no one could even think of not supporting it, they jack up the prices.
The moral of the story: patent law needs to be amended so that you must enforce it, or lose it. You shouldn't be allowed to hide the patent until you can extort a fortune from everybody and his brother who implemented what they assumed was a free algorithm.
Incidentally, it may be possible to generate GIFs without using LZW. Supposedly, you can create a run length encoded file without using LZW that will magically get decompressed correctly by an LZW decoder. It depends on the scope of the patent.
If you used a licensed program (program that paid unisys' licensing fee, I mean, not "non-pirated") to create the GIF, you are fine. I assume accuweather is creating GIFs on the fly from a CGI script.
--Kevin
I imagine Unisys would justify this under something like due diligence. That, for all you can complain that they never should have received the patent in the first place, nevertheless it is their duty to enforce it, and if they didn't, they could be sued by their shareholders.
What I question is whether exercising this patent really does constitute due diligence. Especially exercising it the way they are now, asking $3,000,000 fees. Strikes me that there's more publicity advantage to being The Makers of the Graphic Format That The Whole Internet Uses, (akin to Cisco's "90% of the internet runs on the systems of one company, Cisco Systems" ads) than there is financial advantage gained by charging these fees.
Just my random $0.02CDN.
Johnath
I'm glad Unisys is doing this. Not only are they displaying themselves as the idiots they obviously are, but now major companies will be switching to PNG. Which means Netscape and MSIE will soon follow with really good PNG support. Which means we'll finally be able to get rid of the completely obsolete graphics format that is GIF and replace it in it's entirety with PNG (and JPEG where useful).
I get a nice flamey email about once a week from some ass who calls me a hypocrite and slams me for not getting out a new release. My usual response is to tell them that I delay replacing GIFs with PNGs by 24 hours each time someone asks me when I'm going to do it. They'll be replaced when they're finished. And if you ask me again I'll postpone it again.
(the original quote is here)
Aside from trying to get money out of GIF, what do they do all day? The days of the Remington-Rand/Sperry-Rand UNIVAC are long gone, and their PCs are just HPs. Do they even deal with UNIX anymore? I looked around www.unisys.com and all I can figure is they sell piles of hype to big business. Am I close?
Yu Suzuki
Yu Suzuki
Deamcast. It's thinking.