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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."

1 of 632 comments (clear)

  1. Re:check out MacGIMP.org by the_quark · · Score: 3, Offtopic

    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.