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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."
- They are a company; their business is making money, not being cool (except to the extend that being cool helps business).
- They are publicly traded, so they have a legal obligation to their stockholders to do their best to make money, even at the expense of being cool.
- Making money means pursuing every strategy available to them to its fullest extent, and taking advantage of whatever the law, the world, and circumstance gives them.
- Sometimes this means doing cool things, like open-sourcing the core of their new OS.
- Sometimes the means doing crappy things, like abusing an overinflated body of intellectual property law.
Of course, if they really do put the brakes on PNG (and let's wait to hear all sides of the story), and if that hurts their business (e.g. it hurts their good standing with their customers and developers), they won't do it. So maybe sending them a polite but firm e-mail asking for an explanation isn't a bad idea.Has Apple actually made any threats on this, or did someone just find this statement and see it as a possible precursor to a threat?
PNG has been around for a while now, and Apple has never(AFAIK) said anything about it in the past. I really don't see how this changes anything.
Now we're gonna get all these slashbots telling us how Apple is evil and everyone should boycott OS X/Darwin because of this, when they really haven't done anything. Chicken Little ought not be the standard tone of every Slashdot story.
I posted this before as AC, but since it didn't get any points, I thought no one would see it, and I _do_ think it might help.
Actually, Alvy Ray Smith with Ed Catmull created an alpha compositing system in 1978 while Ed Catmull was doing a paper for SIGGRAPH '78.
He states this in his paper "Alpha and the History of Digital Compositing" in August 1995.
He says that his earliest dated documentation he has for that code is dated January 13, 1978. He specifically showed compositing an alpha image on a background which should just be like another image. I hope this helps
Guess what? I got a fever! And the only prescription.. is more cowbell!
Have we already forgot the GIF fiasco?
It was well known that de-facto standard for file compression in the net, "compress", was covered by the Unisys compression patent. However, showed no interest in enforcing the patent outside hardware (modems and the like), and would informally tell people who asked that.
Nonetheless the FSF insisted on having a patent free compression format for use by GNU, and eventually settled on gzip. This made some people angry, it was annoying to have to deal with a new compression format, and they claimed the FSF was seeing ghosts and that Unisys would never change their policy.
However, as we all know, Unisys *did* change their policy, allthough the target wasn't compress (which meanwhile had lost most of its markedshare to gzip), but GIF which used the same algorithm internally, and had become a big thing thanks to the WWW. Thankfully, at that time we had gzip, and could create PNG fast using the same code.
The morale "they haven't enforced the patent yet" provide false security. Companies don't enforce software patents until it become economically profitable to do so, typically when the algorithm is in so common use that it will be expensive to switch to an alternative. What we need is a legally binding promise not to enforce the patent.