PNG Group Unconcerned About Apple's Patent

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday November 20, 2001 @08:21AM from the devil-may-care dept.

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?

2 of 137 comments (clear)

Re:PNG's by szomb · 2001-11-20 08:29 · Score: 4, Funny

Uh, sorry, what? Is anyone out there still *not* using PNG?

--
Just because a few of us can read write and do a little math, doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe
The actual forum post by marmoset · 2001-11-20 08:30 · Score: 5, Funny

The OSOpinion article refers to Greg Roelofs'
forum post. My favorite part of the Roelofs' post is this classic line:

" So I nominate this for the 2001 tempest-in-a-teapot award... But since the /. crowd lives for this stuff, I wouldn't presume to imagine that my comments will have any discernable effect on the (flame)festivities. :-) "

How many posts did that article get the other day? :)