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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...?"
... for it to be obsolete.
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
This doesn't affect the average user, or even creator of GIFs. I imagine that companies like Adobe would not have to pay a royalty any longer, but this saving is unlikely to be passed to purchasers of image software.
What I find genuinely hilarious, however, is the United State of America's Patent System.
My work here is dung.
October 1st came early this year...
As lame as this whole thing was, if it hadn't happened, we wouldn't have the PNG standard today.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Does anybody find Unisys' page on GIF as hilarious as I do...? .....No
Don't Tread on Me
Of course, like most on here, I will relish the day that the LZW patent expires. But look at how long that took to expire. Every day someone patents yet another obvious invention and it holds everybody back.
Take the Certicom 'Patents' on Eliptic Curve cryptography (ECC). Certicom act as if they own ECC - the write it on practically everything they publish.
Yet on close analysis their patents give them almost no real control of ECC. The long and short of it that anything that operates on GF(p) is not covered.
The consequences of this is that NOBODY is using ECC, despite the fact that it's faster and has shorter keys. The whole field is held back for 20 years and nobody can make any progress.
It's not even used in Europe where these patents don't exist. Let me repeat this: The fact that some jerk of a company says it's theirs means the *whole* world doesn't use me.
I really wonder what goes through the minds of these poeple. Nobody wants to pay a fucktard like Certicom (tm) for a license for their mathematics. Nobody in the history of cryptography has made any serious amount of money from selling a security scheme. Why bother?
Simon
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.
JPEG isn't a replacement for GIF. 8-bit PNG serves pretty well as a replacement under many circumstances, but it's not supported as ubiquitously, nor does it support animation. Java and Javascript have nothing to do with it, and flash is fine for some animations, but it's certainly no less encumbered by IP restrictions than GIF.
Let's say you have a 4 color raster logo. Are you going to make a JPEG? That'd be dumb. Let's say you have that same logo, and you want to animate it for 3 frames. What's a better solution than animated GIF?
I've written a small PNG encoder and found that for 1 and 4-bit grayscale images, PNG routinely trounces GIF. I expect a 4-bit palette color PNG would yield similar results. PNG's method of cramming multiple pixels per byte prior to compression seems to be much more effective than GIF judging by the file sizes - though I admit I've yet to take a hard look at GIF to discover exactly why.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
The only thing it's used for these days is cheesy animated banner ads, but that's quickly being replaced with flash and java stuff.
First, that's just not true. Go to major web sites, look at the source, and search for ".gif". They're all over the fricken place. And who in their right mind would use Java for a bannar ad? I haven't noticed this, but the idea is completely retarded. Flash--- well Flash has its own problems. You need an expensive program to make them, and a special plug-in to view them. They can be better for certain purposes, especially if you want your ad to be interactive somehow, but if you just want to make a slideshow of completely different images, you're not going to beat animated GIFs for ease, or even size.
Professional Web developers, if they're any good, will use the proper tools for the job, and try to maximize compatibility as much as possible across different browsers. Use of plain HTML, CSS, JPEGs, and GIFs should be used the their maximum capability before looking to Javascript, and certainly before Java or Flash.
Finally, I can now sleep soundly, knowing the flaming torches on by web site are -fully legal- flaming torches.
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
Slashdot posted something two days early?? *head explodes*
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"