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GIF Patent Prepares to Expire

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the all-skate-everyone-skate dept.

pajamacore writes "It's worth noting that 20 June 2003 is GIF Liberation Day, the day on which US Patent 4,558,302 expires. The patent describes the LZW compression algorithm used in .gif files. That said, maybe the prices of image editing applications will drop slightly when corporations don't have to pay fees to Unisys."

9 of 632 comments (clear)

  1. check out MacGIMP.org by ubiquitin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The MacGIMP site is getting ready to release a GIF-enabled build of the GIMP at midnight.

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    http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
  2. Re:Or not... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not sure how much, but I work at a medium size company who produces multimedia applications (yes your mom would have heard of us) and .GIF support was expensive enough that we left it out of the product.

  3. Tell CmdrTaco you want PNG! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    From the recent Slashdot chat:
    02:17 <+Questions> adpowers asks: Slashdot has a heavy slant toward open and free technologies. Why haven't you guys adopted PNGs or some other image format instead of sticking with GIFs?
    02:18 <@CmdrTaco> Because PNG still doesn't work worth shit with most browsers.
    02:18 <@CmdrTaco> We're idealists when possible, but practical when we have to be.
    What browsers is CmdrTaco talking about? PNG8 works great in most browsers, and PNG8 is all that's necessary to replace GIFs. Slashdot doesn't use animated GIFs, so they have no reason to not move to PNG8. PNG can save Slashdot money, as properly compressed PNG files are smaller than GIF.

    I'd pay for a Slashdot subscription if Slashdot switched to PNGs because then I'd see they were bandwidth/cost concious.
    1. Re:Tell CmdrTaco you want PNG! by Kupo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      title.gif = 3.39 KB (3,473 bytes) (Original Slashdot logo on top right)
      title.png = 3.34 KB (3,428 bytes) (PNG8 16 color palette)

      A conversion would make a mere 45 byte difference.

      Oh my... how could I be such an insensitive clod - I forgot some of us are still using 2400 baud modems!

      Honestly, the .gif format works well, and AFAIK, my cell browser doesn't open PNG at all. Not that slashdot.wap uses images, however...

    2. Re:Tell CmdrTaco you want PNG! by Captain+Large+Face · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Microsoft Internet Explorer, which is used by a significant proportion of the Slashdot readership, does not support transparency in PNG images. From Slashdot's point of view, it makes little sense to switch when the current solution works adequately .

  4. Re:Or not... by G-funk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm wondering if the text on gnu.org protesting the patent will disappear :)

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    Send lawyers, guns, and money!
  5. Re:Or not... by MulluskO · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's really all a matter or price elasticity. Pricing isn't quite as dependant upon production costs as most people believe.

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    Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
  6. Re:Or not... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No, the Gimp sucks because its support for well-documented, established, standard file formats like EPS still lags behind that found in simple toys like PaintShop Pro.

    Until it can read and save standard files in a way useful to me for file exchange, I don't care what the UI looks like, what features it has, or what the license is.

  7. Re:Or not... by Daengbo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We are under a Free software revolution in Thailand (see my sig), so I am seeing reviews of Linux / OO.o / others in almost every magazine. The reviews generally run like this: "The program works well and doesn't crash often, but I don't recommend its use because it's interface/hotkeys/configuration is/are not like the equivalent program in Windows that I am familiar with." I do not claim that GIMPcan compare to PS, but we use it full time in my school, and my wife has known nothing else.
    Sometimes she reads books on PS (there are none for Gimp) and says "Wow! that's cool. That takes me xx commands in Gimp," but both she and I know that 90% of the stuff can be scripted, by us or somebody else. I hope to spend some time with Script-fu and get those for her.
    The other 10% is functional stuff that I have no way to fix, like CMYK. We don't do print, just in-house web stuff, so we are fine.

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    Put identity in the browser.