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?
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
I'm not sure on the merits of the GIF format after all these years, the only thing it brings to the web expierence is flashing adverts, PNG provides full alpha-transparency which is really required for the future of web design.
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
You can't make animations with PNG files....
Sure you can, only the result is called MNG.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
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
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
The original Welch paper is pretty readable:
Terry A. Welch, "A Technique for High Performance Data Compression", IEEE Computer, Vol. 17, No. 6, 1984, pp. 8-19.
If you don't want to go to a library and look that up, then Google will find you about 12000 hits on "Welch LZW", and the first few all seem to be exactly what you want.
Actually that patent is being used in IBM's (second amended) counterclaims in the SCO v IBM case.
JeR
Just to set the record straight:
When I led the process of drafting the PNG specification, GIF animation did not yet exist. Animation was not part of the original GIF specification. The GIF89a specification *did* offer a mechanism for including multiple images in a single file, and a very basic (but, in retrospect, effective) mechanism for replacing only a specified part of the preceding image. But whether this was supposed to be animation with a time component was never defined, and there was in fact no way to specify how long each frame was supposed to appear, probably because the real intent was to be able to compose a single final still image from many sections. Multiple image GIFs were a footnote to the GIF specification which hardly anybody used until Netscape stepped in.
Netscape's animated GIF format was a clever hack on top of this: they defined a new GIF chunk to specify the pause between frames.
Here's the kicker: Netscape was repeatedly invited to participate in the PNG design process. They had someone reading the list, I gather, but they never offered any suggestions or contributions. If they had, they would likely have been considered very seriously.
But instead, the first we heard of GIF animation was its public release in Netscape (2.0 beta, if I recall correctly). They could have contributed to the design of a PNG or MNG that did include animation and, by way of that compelling feature, would have been more likely to quickly replace GIF. But they didn't.
We (the PNG designers) did consider retrofitting animation into PNG when Netscape's animated GIF appeared. In fact, I lobbied for that at one point. Unfortunately we had already finalized the functional specification and there was no hope of reaching agreement on how to "jam in" the animation feature at the last minute on top of an otherwise pretty elegant image format.
Instead, the MNG group was formed to create a specification for a powerful lossless animation format. And they succeeded -- but MNG has yet to really catch fire, and animated vector formats like SWF and SVG are gradually replacing animated GIF anyway for most purposes. At the end of the day, lossless bitmap animation is a pretty bandwidth-intensive proposition.
Check out the Apostrophe open-source CMS: http://www.apostrophenow.com/
UnixWare's compress program (for *.Z files) is
infringing on this patent.
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.