GIF Support Returns to GD

g_adams27 writes "Legions of geeks and developers owe a debt of gratitude to Tom Boutell and his "gd" library, which powers the drawing and graphic-generating tools used by dozens of open-source projects. And now, with the expiration of the last Unisys patent on the GIF format, support for GIFs has finally been reinserted in gd. The GIF/PNG/MNG wars may continue, but having more options is good!"

Comments

nice

[Ari_Haviv]

but I'd rather see widespread adoption of PNG

So what?

[Inominate]

The only remaining use of the GIF is for animated images, something GD is bad at producing anyways.

Then people always like to say stupid shit like "Well IE has bad support for png". While true,it doesn't stop pngs from doing everything a gif does(minus animation). IE may not support the alpha channel correctly, but it still has the full-on transparency of GIF's.

So who cares? Let gifs fucking die, we don't need them anymore.

Re:IBM

[DarkEdgeX]

It's already been repeatedly extended. Copyrights only used to last something like 14 years (not 14 years from the authors death, but 14 years from the time of creation). Since then it's been extended, then based upon the authors time of death, then extended in reference to that at least twice now.

My impression is the same as yours, that the Supreme Court will not give the Congress a blank check to keep extending copyright, but at the same time, we have no idea which Supreme Court Justices will be around by the time this issue arises again.