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Interview with Don Marti
mpawlo writes "I just picked Don Marti's brain in a short interview published by Greplaw. Don Marti is the editor of LinuxJournal and the mastermind behind the Burnallgifs campaign. He has strong views on free software, software patentability and the freedom of the Internet. Marti should personally be featured in any encyclopedia under 'geektivism' and the brief interview may be of interest to Slashdotters not yet familiar with Mr Marti."
I use ESR's gif2png to convert my legacy GIF files to PNG for web use. I provide Solaris SPARC and x86 packages (Linux packages are available elsewhere).
The LZW compression algorithm is patented. This is used in, for example, UNIX compress. In response to this, GNU wrote gzip for compression. GIF images also use the LZW algorithm.
Unisys owns licensing rights to the LZW patent. They typically go to web site operators (large ones), and ask them to pay licensing fees, or prove that all the GIFs they serve came from licensed programs. Kinda creepy. Of course, none of the enforcement came until GIFs were widely used.
In response, a group of open source hackers wrote the png spec, which uses the gzip compression technique. Also, postscript and pdf added gzip compression (flate compression) in addition to LZW compression, so that people could make pdfs without worrying about patent licensing.
The GIF patent will expire in less than a year, I think. It is still WIDELY used. However, development has continued at full speed on png formats, and has halted on GIFs. Even when they become legal, the next generation of software will use pngs instead (because the DEVELOPMENT stopped, not because it "used to be patented").
_Nobody_ uses browsers like Netscape or IE or Opera or Mozilla or any of the other browsers that support png.
IE (for windows) and png support are two things I very rarely see in the same sentence unless poor is in there as well somewhere. Though I'm more annoyed by it's total lack of mng support than it half assed png support.
Everything will be taken away from you.
GIF files are not covered by the patent. There is no risk in distributing GIF files or in using the GIF name. According to a CompuServe spokesperson, "Recent discussions of GIF taxes and fees are totally without merit. For people who view GIF images, who keep GIF images on servers, or who are creating GIF images for distribution, the recent licensing discussions have no effect on their activities."
I think the most critical aspect of that article occurs earlier, where it says
Nothing in this article should be regarded as legal counsel. If you require legal or other expert assistance, you should consult a professional advisor.
Also, the article is wrong. Unisys now claims that distributing GIFs requires making a copy of a file that requires the LZW algorithm. Thus, it is also patent protected. So far, they've done a pretty good business collecting fees from web site operators.
The GIF patent will expire in less than a year, I think.
The GIF patent expires June 20, 2003 and is US patent 4,558,302.