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ISO Could Withdraw JPEG Standard
McSpew writes "According to The Register, the ISO is prepared to withdraw JPEG as a standard if Forgent Networks continues to assert its patent claims over JPEG's compression algorithm." I'm sure the JPEG committee would still be happy to hear of prior art.
Just thought I'd chime in and re-iterate that you're retarded. PNG is a good replacement for GIF, not for JPEG.
Nevermind the fact that you, like most other Linux hippies, are in denial of widespread adaption of proprietary formats. MP3? No! Ogg! Flash? No! SVG (or whatever it is)! GIF? No! PNG!
Sure in an ideal world we'd have open specs for everything, but since, despite popular opinion, you open source dorks usually just follow the lead of companies, in many cases the open standards come out after the lonely hippies steal the ideas of the commercial versions.
SMB and .doc are not standards, because they are based on secret information and are subject to change at Microsoft's whim. Talk about cheerleading...
You seem to believe cynicism makes you insightful, and I suppose many moderators agree. Oh well, moderators are clueless fuckwits anyway.
Nevermind the fact that you, like most other Linux hippies, are in denial of widespread adaption of proprietary formats. MP3? No! Ogg! Flash? No! SVG (or whatever it is)! GIF? No! PNG!
The hell you say! I use different technologies when certain situations call for them. I am not open-source only and a 'linux hippie'. I am far from that. I just happen to prefer png to jpg. Plain and fucking simple. Its assholes like you that turn this into a complete idiological debate and blow things out of proportion. I like PNG over JPEG. It doesnt make me a linux hippie, a communist, or a fucking weirdo. And you were modded up... lol.
Do they do anything besides extort for patents?
Does anybody know anybody who has contracts with Forgent? Does anybody have influence over that? If so, they need to be dropped.
The governments are slow to respond. This patent nonsense is ridiculous. What needs to start happening is "takedowns". A company like Forgent comes out of nowhere and demands royalty payments on something which has been in widespread use for a very long time on the assumption it was not so legally encumbered. This company never even contributed to the algorithm in the first place, so the argument that it's "fair recompence for fair work" is obviously bogus; it's nothing more than extortion which is legal under laws that are out of date. That company then needs to get spanked, and hard, and pubically. They need to suffer bigtime for their arrogance and their mistake. Everybody else needs to see them suffer, so that they will think twice before trying the same bullshit trick.
Anybody who is giving money to Forgent now needs to stop. Companies and individuals, or whoever Forgent currently makes money off, needs to boycott them, cancel their contracts. Forgent needs to go out of business, and it needs to be public and messy. We can't sit back and take it every time some piss-ant little technology-wannabe firm (a category in which I'd include Unisys nowadays) comes forward and starts claiming violation of "their" intellectual property. Somebody somehow has got to start putting these people in their place.
These parasites on society create nothing but grief; they do all sorts of damage to the community at large, getting rich themselves. It's no better than the behavior of the execs at Enron, it just happens to be legal. The system needs to be reformed; I wish our government would see their way through to doing that, but I don't have much hope. (Hell, our government is too busy going in the other direction with things like the DMCA, TIPS, and everything else that makes us so happy.).
... and then, in an unholy trinity with .BMP files, they shall once and for all crush any opposition and reign supreme! Muahahahahahaha!