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The GIF Format is Finally Patent-Free
tonymercmobily writes "Not many people noticed that the GIF file format is only now free from patents, as of the 1st of October 2006. Quick recap: first in 1999 Unisys tried to extort money from users and developers. Then, in 2003 the world hoped that the saga would finally be over. Then, in 2004, it was IBM's turn. Now, the SAGA seems to be over for real! Does anybody find Unisys' page on GIF as hilarious as I do...?"
Evidence? Except for 1x1 images and the like, you're wrong. And you shouldnt' be using 1x1 images anyhow so...
Before sending any examples, make sure you're comparing same-depth images and have used pngout.
I once, as a demonstration, took a review off HardOCP and converted/recompressed all their GIFs into PNG, and saved several hundreds of kilobytes.
Still webmasters continue to use GIF because of ignorance.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
so, with a free alternative, why use GIF up to now?
I also did a quick search of common file types on Google*
GIF 519,000,000
JPG 777,000,000
JPEG 111,000,000
BMP 44,700,000
PNG 111,000,000
So GIF is not all _that_ dead. * = Results could mean anything really - PNG could be Paupua New Gunnea, and BMP could be best manufacturing practices.
Not entirely true. gzip is substantially faster and less processor intensive than bzip2, and is still commonly used where speed is as important as size. gzip is also more suitable for compressing streams than bzip2, which operates on large blocks, if I remember correctly. For those reasons, gzip is still heavily if not exclusively used for on the wire compresson, for example in transparent compression of http pages or cvs downloads.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
When MNG (animated PNG) is supported by all major browsers, I probably won't use GIF for anything anymore.
Not being a web developer, I'm not familiar with the features and benefits of MNGs, but if they're at all similar to animated GIFs, I hope Firefox's image.animation_mode=none setting will apply when visiting the web sites you design.
LZW was published in IEEE in '84 by Welsh. It did not mention the patent. Some have argued this made the algorithm public knowledge. Unisys applied for the patent in '83, but did not enforce it until '89 WHEN IT WAS WIDELY ADOPTED. A lot of people that helped its adoption did so under the impression it was patent free.
So... how can it be stolen... if it was given away?
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
No. Konqueror is the only browser to natively support MNGs, all other browsers need plugins. Mozilla used to some years ago, but they removed native support when no one used MNG.