PNG Group Unconcerned About Apple's Patent

melquiades writes: "A recent story raised concerns that Apple's patent on some forms of alpha compositing was blocking the development of PNG, MNG and SVG. Not so, says Greg Roelofs, a member of the PNG group: 'The PNG group did discuss the Apple patent several weeks ago, and we decided it was completely irrelevant to PNG itself, almost certainly irrelevant to the pnmtopng utility and to PNGs animated extension, MNG, and probably irrelevant to SVG as well.' Here's the article on OS Opinion. So if it's not a big deal, why was there a general call for prior art to overturn Apple's patent? It looks like some PNG developers got worried, but the core team thinks there's no problem. Is this just a case of the right hand not knowing that the left hand is paranoid?" Once bitten, twice shy?

Comments

it's relevant all right

[mj6798]

Unfortunately, the article referenced does not seem to give any details for why people think this isn't "relevant"; there is no analysis of the claims.

Apple itself identified the patent as relevant to SVG and at some point asked for non-discriminatory royalty payments. They apparently have backed off from those requirements by now, but Apple still hasn't dedicated the patent to the public domain, leaving some legal uncertainty hanging over open source projects.

If the Apple patent were valid, I think it could be a problem and might have to be overturned. In that sense, it is "relevant", and it makes a lot of sense to collect prior art.

It's also relevant in a different sense: it tells us about what Apple is up to, what their attitude is towards free and open source software, and the intellectual and research standards at the company.