Slashdot Mirror
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?
PNG files are not a better format. The folks that created it shot themselves in the foot by ignoring the primary reason to use a GIF file. Animation.
You can't make animations with PNG files....
GIF's are almost always smaller than PNG's for icons and things like that.
I'm sure microsoft will make some retarded image format that nothing but IE can read, and the whole windows community will think it's oh so leet. damn the majority!!! .mif (Microsoft Image Format)
--------- let's go steal some lunchboxes!
The only reason they use GIF is because it infringes on someone's patent! Think about it. Linux infringes SCO's patents. GIF infringes Unisys's (now IBM's) patents. All the illegal mp3s and movies they download infringe someone's copyrights. I think it's fucking hillarious how Slashbots go all apeshit when someone is caught infringing the GPL, though. The hypocrasy is all around us.