Apple Patent Blocking PNG Development

Daniel writes: "Apple has a patent (U.S. Patent No. 5,379,129) on compositing a source and destination image using a mask image. This patent appears to read on alpha channel transparency, which the PNG and MNG file formats use. APPLE has declared in their patent statement to the Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group that their patent is only available for RAND Licensing. Since this patent appears to read on the PNG file format, Apple is hampering work on the PNG and MNG file formats. Perhaps Apple would like to clarify this situation by explicitly stating that this patent does not cover the PNG and MNG file formats or by RF Licensing their patent to the PNG and MNG development groups. Alternatively, the PNG and MNG developers are asking people to submit prior art in order to invalidate Apple's patent. SGI in particular appears to have prior art with their 'blendfunction.' Make sure the prior art you submit is older than May 08, 1992, the filing date of Apple's patent."

Comments

PNG Open Source Masturbation

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on.... who cares? The GIF (LZW) patent is due to expire within a year anyway, so why would you bother with gif? I bet you could even start using it now without Unisys being able to do much about enforcement. Yes it handles bigger images and more colors, but if you care about the image why aren't you using TIFF? It's not like storage or RAM is incredibly expensive. MNG is not and never has been a standard, it is just a proposal - animated GIF is here to stay.

Re:Outdated, irrelevant facts w/o more info

[sydb]

I cant believe how retarded slashdot is

Slashdot does those things to prevent hastiness leading to lame posts... like the two you created.

Whether it's foolproof or not is clearly open to question.