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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.
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.
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.
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