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GIF Slips Away From Unisys; Your Move, IBM
Twenty years ago, Terry Welch's improvement on Lempel-Ziv compression appeared in IEEE Computer magazine. The authors of unix 'compress' and the GIF standard incorporated that algorithm without realizing it was patent-pending. When the submarine patent surfaced ten years later, its new owner Unisys intimidated developers and web authors into moving away from GIFs, inspiring the creation of a better standard, though sadly still a less popular one. Today, July 7, 2004, Unisys's last LZW patent (in Canada) expires, leaving GIF once again free... almost. See, there's the small matter of IBM's patent, granted on the same algorithm, which is valid for another two years. That still has a chilling effect on GIF development, though the consensus seems to be that IBM would lose any court action it tried to bring. So how about it, IBM? You've got nothing to lose! Want to make a lot of geeks happy and release that final patent into the public domain?
Do it for the common good. Aside from business, really what open source is for!
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
and png truly is a better standard why should geeks care what happens to gif?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Having one of the most commonly used compression algorithms in the public domain is going to be a huge boon for me as a student because it'll allow me to finally see how commonly LHZ is implimented and let me study compression.
Anyone happen to have a copy of the alg. lying around?
"Curiouser and Curiouser" - Alice
What would be the benefit of giving up the patent? We've already got .png, right?
What would be more interesting is suing someone over it. This patent "cold war" is annoying - it would be more beneficial to see an all-out war where large companies crumble, and the idiocy of software patents is demonstrated once and for all. Cold war only server to suffocate, and masses never learn of the damage being done, because it's so invisible.
Interesting article on how IP law conflicts with ancient chinese tradition is here
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Sadly whilst few web designers care that my browser doesn't render Arial and my system doesn't play windows media, they *do* care about the large number of punters out there whose old windows 9x system's browser doesn't support png...
For all the chest thumping that has gone on on slashdot about the gif patent it never made sense to me why they never replaced their gifs. How hard would it have been to have a page with gifs and a page with pngs and then switched between them based on user agent string? I think all the arguments that were made would have had much more weight if they would have put their money where their mouth is.
In Republican America phones tap you.
Internet Explorer still fails to correctly support PNG's superior transparency capabilities. Otherwise I would have adopted it much sooner in my web development. Can't run round incorporating standards into your websites that the browser that holds 95% market dominance does not support.
</TokenMicroSuckJab>
$ whatis themeaningoflife
themeaningoflife: not found
Why yes, nothing to lose. Which is exactly why you're practically begging them.
... though the consensus seems to be that IBM would lose any court action it tried to bring.
No offense jamie, but you should really refrain from making things up like this. There is no one anywhere with any sort of legal background that would agree with this. Hell, it's probably libel to say that. It most assuredly is an outright lie.
If IBM releases it, then that's great, but don't try to badger them into it.
Is there a reason that the writer of this topic chose to talk about the implications about having GIF open to the public rather than talk about having LZW open?
I personally think having LZW is of much more significance than GIF.
"Curiouser and Curiouser" - Alice
I really doubt IBM is going to go after anybody.
Unisys was collecting money on GIF licenses for years, if IBM wanted to capitalize on this, they would've sued Unisys back then.
Besides that, there is good reason: It is, by all accounts I've read, the same algorithm.
The Unisys LZW patent had even been granted before the IBM patent had been applied. It had priority by a mile. The IBM patent is simply worthless.
Developers shouldn't concern themselves with bogus patents. I for one have written programs which save GIF files, and although I respect(ed) the Unisys patent, I'm not at all worried about the IBM one.
Your comment makes no sense in this context.
IE doesn't support alpha transparency in PNGs, and that's substandard on their part, but I don't think the web would change much if it did unless everybody started bloating their sites with transparent effects where it is not needed.
You couldn't be more wrong. If people could use PNG the way it's supposed to be used, we could have rounded corner graphics that don't suck, change background colors without having to modify all images to match, have different background colors on different pages without the need for extra graphics for each different color background, allow user-selectable page colors, et cetera. It would actually save a lot of bandwidth.
As it is, there is very little benefit to using PNG in most cases, so people don't switch.
And PNGs with alpha-transparency are not "bloated" by any means.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
If you're sending stuff to press, chances are you're not using GIMP, you're using Adobe Photoshop. Adobe is a licensee of all the relevant patents, not that it's necessary since most houses will simply accept your PSD's (which format is doubtless protected by a suite of patents of its own).
Either way, you're safe.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
It was a big breakthrough when algorithms like LZW, which compressed data that contained repeated multi-byte patterns (like text, or bitmap drawings), were developed. The previous state of the art was to pre-analyze the data and build a table that would have to be exchanged before the data could be decompressed (like Huffman encoding). LZW lets you built the table on-the-fly as the data is compressed, and exchange it on-the-fly as its being decoded (because the compression "table" and the data stream are actually the same.)
LZW does seem simple to us now; in fact one standard Job Interview question I ask is to put the LZW algorithm on the whiteboard! However, for those of use who have been around for more than 20 years, it was a significant breakthrough.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Some people don't have the option to live in an ideological world and must live in a realistic one.
Elsewehere in this thread I've mentioned that I continue to use .gifs, because it's not realistic to ditch them. Regardless; I'd hardly descibe my position as "ideological" or "unrealistic" - it's one based on:
1. Portable Network Graphics work with all major browsers - now (IE doesn't support one area of PNGs, but it doesn't lose any functionality over GIFs, as GIFs don't provide 8-bit alpha-blending anyway);
2. GIFs may - as this article is about - still be patent-encumbered.
In what way is promoting increased use of PNGs unrealistic?
This is where the serious fun begins.
I guess me marching in civil rights demos and taking the gas was of no use, because in the practical real world, black people were treated as non human sub standard citizens, by the majority. I guess me marching in the anti war and anti draft marches was illogical, as you know it's the states right to concoct wars based on uttered untruths, and to place people into involuntary servitude in order to..push some agendas, and this was the default position of the majority at the time. I guess me demonstrating and lobbying against some corporate polluters was impractical, because at the time almost all the corporations just dumped whatever toxic waste they wanted to anyplace they felt like it. Over 95% of them did so. they were the "practical majority". You were going against the norm then if you sought changes or did something different, it was impractical to do so, you had to struggle harder in 'the real world" to make a point, your "side" was barely 5%, so we shouldn't have done that, according to your logic.
You see, that was "the real world" back then, the "practical" world. It was "impractical" to go against thw societal norm, and in that case it was physically impractical, as you could have been gassed, beat, arrested, serve jail time, and etc. So heaven forbid you have some internet surfer be inconvenienced by a semi non standard format on your web page,you or your corporation might suffer some "inconvenience" in your profits or something. Your profits are obviously of more worth to you, so go ahead, protect your profits, that is your right.
Let's always leave things exactly as they are now, let's none of us ever go against the norm, it is impractical, we might lose money,and as we all know, money is the most important thing in the known universe,95% of the people agree, nothing is as important as money, all other aspects of society should revolve around money, it's accumulation and restriction in as many diverse ways as can be imagined. Let's all "work" for a small number of large corporations, always seek to do those things that are dictated to us by our "betters" in those corporations and pseudo legitimate governmental agencies, because they, having the most money,and the most "practical" power and influence currently, must always surely know a better way to do anything, correct? I mean, they are the majority, so they must be "correct".
you were implying that we should go ahead and use the uber-PNG features, and then wait for IE to catch up to see them.
Indeed, and why not? An image is just an image in IE; who cares if only 5%, 6%, 7% (and rising) of the browsing population see it as it was intended? It'll be visible in all its glory once IE 7 is available, or once punters start making the switch to more modern browsers. In the meantime IE users won't be adversely affected, and it might even prompt them to drag themselves into the 21st century, browser-wise.
This is where the serious fun begins.
Switching to PNG because 5% or browsers will benefit is the unrealistic part.
Well, all browsers, including IE, can use PNGs. I presume you're refering to alpha-blending, which IE can't - currently - use? Use of non-IE browsers is steadily rising, as support for IE seems either non-existent or focused on "IE7" or whatever it'll be called. This suggusts - to me - two things:
1. Increasing numbers of people are using browsers - now - that do support alpha-blending;
2. The next iteration of IE is likely to support alpha-blending and is probably due soon (maybe soon like Longhorn, but soon, anyway...);
Either way, catering for the present-and-the-not-too-distant future doesn't seem that unrealistic.
This is where the serious fun begins.
The quality of a web site is determined more by it's substance than by it's appearance.
Good web site design doesn't even require images.
Alpha blending is not critical.
It's nice, but IMO it's ranks below "spell checker" in the hierarchy of good web site design tools.
-- less is better.
He's right; it's one of IBM's counterclaims against SCO. Of course, if any part of SCO's motion to bifurcate (split off the patent suits), IBM could elect to drop it and later dispose of the patent somehow. You can read a transcript of the relevant hearing here on Groklaw.
SCO's answer to IBM's counterclaims accuses it, among other things, of selectively enforcing it. I'm not quite sure what basis there is in law for using that as a defense, however, or if that was just boilerplate text in SCO's reply.
Wrong.
That's a techie urban-legend. The truth is that IE6 does support all required PNG features. Therefore it "supports PNG".
Yes, IE6 doesn't support PNG transparency, at least not in any easy way. However PNG transparency is an optional part of the PNG spec. That IE6 doesn't support transparency properly is unfortunate but doesn't invalidate their meeting the required PNG spec.
Furthermore as others have pointed out there are indeed work-arounds (ugly ones) that will enable reliable PNG transparency on IE6. Also as others have pointed out (including MS staffers) even if IE7 were to ship tomorrow and support PNG et al we'd still be stuck with a huge IE6-using population for years to come.
It would be great if IE, and indeed all of the browsers, were to fully meet all relevant standards. It would also be great if they were to then go on and meet more of the optional parts of those standards, including PNG transparency. However lets hold everyone's feet to the fire on these, not pick on one author's neglecting a feature many would like while they and others are still missing more fundamental required parts of specs.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
According to the stats at this link (thanks to an earlier poster), IE share is declining, with IE6 being only 72% and IE5 just over 8%. Mozilla (>12%) makes up most of the rest, with Opera, Netscape and others trailing.
The 95% figure may be the Windows share of the market (more like 94.5% by that link), but not everyone using Windows uses IE. (If I'm setting up a desktop that has to have Windows, Mozilla is the first app I load on it, and then remove the IE icon from the desktop.)
The recent notices from Homeland Security about IE being unsafe will only accelerate this.
-- Alastair
I doubt that something like this may be the case, but it does sound quite possible. However I don't feel that they would be willing to let this go.
/ LC link.htm
I have heard that IBM uses its large warehouse of patents purely as a method of protecting itself from lawsuits. Upon digging around a bit, I found that IBM had done the same thing to Sun that it is now trying against SCO.
http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html
The number of patents that IBM has surely must number in the millions by now. I wouldn't be surprised if they had patented parts of most of what you see in the computer world these days. Either that or have patents on its prior art.
I find it unlikely that IBM would really want to go to the effort of launching lawsuits against nearly everybody and everything that ever touched code and become another SCO.
We've also already heard that IBM does not prosecute their patents against open source developers.
http://bca.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/bca/cnews/2003/MAR03
So I really have no problem with them sitting on it and suing other companies that try and leverage it as intellectual property against them.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
a better standard (referring to PNG) , though sadly still a less popular one
Not that I'm trying to be flamebait for OSDN, but the very icons applied to this article (in the upper-right corner) are none other than the very GIF standard that was put down in this article. Just thought I'd point that out.
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Intelligence should not be rewarded; ignorance should be punished
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What he meant is that alpha-blending is important in making consistent, standards-compliant pages. In other words, although it's possible to hack around it by pre-blending your images, but you have to re-blend them every time the background changes color. For example, what if you wanted to let the user choose the background color as an accessibility measure (i.e. a normal version and a high-contrast version)? There's no good way to do that without alpha-blended PNGs; you'd have to resort to javascript.
g o_over_orange_and_purple_polka_dots.gif", etc.
It's like CSS for positioning: you don't need it (you could use tables instead), but it makes for better design, because you can separate content from presentation. PNG is like this because then the image is "my_logo.png" rather than "my_logo_over_white_background.gif", "my_logo_over_black_background.gif", "my_logo_over_blue_background.gif", "my_logo_over_puke_green_background.gif",
"my_lo
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz