GIF Patent Prepares to Expire

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."

Comments

Hey...

[Scalli0n]

Hey, I can stop pirating apps then!

Plug for a friend's product

[unfortunateson]

Kevin Mitchell's , one of the first GIF-manipulating products for Mac, is still available as shareware.

He's still dedicated Mac only, so he could use your support.

Re:Reason to Deceive: WMD Lies Could Be the New Wa

[MrMadnutz]

Ummmm... are you in the right discussion???

MacGIMP seeks mirrors for update

[ubiquitin]

If you can spare some bandwidth, please drop by macgimp.org to offer a mirror for the MacGIMP update. It is a 52 megabyte file.

Re:check out MacGIMP.org

[the_quark]

My favorite part about XV was, if you did "xv *.jpg" (for instance) and then deleted some of the files out from under it, it would pop up a box as you got to each file that was deleted to let you know that it couldn't load the picture.

The dialog box said something along the lines of, "Couldn't display picture." But the fun part was, the button didn't say "OK," because, well, it probably wasn't OK. It said "Bummer."

I always thought that was a nice counterpoint to programs that say things like "All of your data has been lost" and then ask you to click "OK" No, it's NOT OK! But xv gaved you a way to acknowledge receipt of the information without having you approve of it, and I always appreciated that.

Re:Adobe helped put Skylarov in jail.

[@madeus]

It's Sklyarov. Get it right.

You are one rude, arrogant in-duh-vidual.

Someone else made a transposition error - so what. It was obvious who the poster was referring too.

Did being pompous and rude over a transposition error make you feel better, did it boost your ego?.

It wasn't even me that made the error, and moronic no-value comments like yours still piss me off.

Tedious grammar and spelling nazi's stifle free speech on the web because people don't want to post if others are just going to nitpick at their spelling or grammar.

Please grow up or find somewhere else to hang out.

stop spreading FUD

[73939133]

and that's why I run on a Mac platform as well [...] and screwing with XFree so that windows don't lock (as) randomly.

XFree86 is reliable and efficient, in particular compared to the Mac OS window system.

If your XFree86 server "locks [up] randomly", you probably have bad hardware, unsupported hardware, or perhaps you are just making it up.

Re:stop spreading FUD

[caveat]

What are you smoking? (Can I have some?) Aqua is just a bit bloated, sure, but with Quartz Extreme and a decent gfx card (9000 Pro in my case), it's rock-solid (not crashed once in 9 months, running 30-45 days uptime) and rather smooth and fast. XF86 on PPC is alright, I've never actually had it *lock*, but it's slower, buggier, and to get it to a decent level of performance, you have to jump through flaming hoops while doing a double-back-somersault and whistling the Star-Spangled Banner. (No, XConfigurator didn't work that well.) Aqua...just WORKS. that's one of the big reasons I own a Mac - i can dink around all i want on the CLI or in config files, but at the end of the day, I don't have to.

(XF86 on x86 Linux is light-years ahead of PPC, IMHO)

Re:Adobe helped put Skylarov in jail.

[frobisch]

It's Atari. Get it right.