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GD Graphics Library withdrawn
Wacko writes "The gd library, which allows on-the-fly creation of GIF files, has been withdrawn due to copyright problems. They say they may release another version in the future, but would either need to remove LZW compression algorithm or charge for the library. " Mmmm...patents & copyright laws, oh my!
Also please note that PNG cannot do animations (yet).
Until then, there's always civil disobedience.
>Also please note that PNG cannot do animations (yet).
This is a good thing IMHO. GIF animations are almost as annoying as the dreaded BLINK tag. Just imagine a web without annoying flashing banners assaulting your eyes (at least until the page completely loads and you can hit escape).
I read the internet for the articles.
yes, but i have to leave that unselected for all windows, so that if i want images in one window, and not others, i have to load them every time i load a page. I should be able to set the auto-load window by window
Instead of continuing to use the old, limited, patent-encumbered GIF format, you should consider using PNG. PNG is a free (speech) format which offers the benefits of GIF without the drawbacks.
Like GIF, PNG offers lossless compression: you won't find the ugly square artifacts you get in JPEGs. However, PNG also offers a wider range of bit depths (1-bit through 24-bit), an alpha channel, and gamma information.
(For those who don't know: An alpha channel is a fourth number attached to each pixel, alongside the red, green, and blue values. It tells how transparent that pixel is to be considered. Most browsers and graphics tools don't support alpha yet, but they will. Gamma information helps different computers, with different display characteristics, render an image in the same real-world colors.)
I use GD as a lightweight portable drawing system and never encode a GIF or read a GIF. (I encode as jpeg usually, too many old non-png browsers around.) There just doesn't seem to be an alternative around. GGI is not portable to windows or mac, X is huge and not easily portable. I need something I can tack on to my programs to draw a JPEG or PNG so I can show the user a graph or picture or whatnot.
You can see over at the Public 8-Ball that I create my queue position messages with GD and then JPEG encode the frame buffer for transmission. I don't worry about the CPU speed, 15 frames/second is easy on the PII-266. You can click the how its done picture and find all the source code plus rantings at Unisys.
Those of you with IE can thank Unisys for making the 8ball unavailable to you. I had realtime animated GIF creation in place for the video, but its too slow without compressing and I don't feel inclined to hire a lawyer and negotiate a license for a license. IE Windows can't handle the mime type for the jpeg movies I use now.
Until I find time to patch lynx so that I can launch extra instances from links, I'm not giving up netscape 3. 4.x crash far to often, and don't have features I use, such as alt to go back, and the moronic move of autoloading of images into preferences rather than a per-page option.
But then, I have no use for graphic, java, and the like, anyway. Just give me the information.
They're beyond being evil.
Using them damns your immortal soul, to a hell in which you are required to use all microsoft products, even bob, enhanced with the paper clip. Your descendants are cursed unto the seventh generation, and your daughters will become first prostitutes, and then meter-maids. Your sons, after siring the next generation, will go to switzerland for removal of optional factory equipment and join your daughters when they return. You will become obsessed with Roseanne Barr, and search the net for porn sites featuring her. You are a bad person, and your mother will deny you.
There, that's more like it. I don't bother to block ads. I do bother to block anything that blinks.
I've expressed these ideas elsewhere in slashdot, but the time seems right to "plant the meme" again, so here goes.
A society needs copyrights and patents. In most fields of human endeavor there are tremdous costs in moving from idea to artifact and patent law helps protect the small innovator from being beat to market by the huge wealthy predator. Patent law (the idea) is good.
Copyrights protect a specific formulation of an idea (a written work) from direct copy. It does not protect the idea itself which may be reused in an original way. Copyright law is meant to protect writers and artists (and by extension television producers who really do not qualify as either of the above). The extension of copyright to software is, IMHO, imprefect but useful.
Patents go to hell in the computer field for two reasons:
1) The granting of patents for ideas which are dubious as to their patentability. I'm thinking here of the company that claims to have a patent on all e-commerce because the made a dial-up system that took sales orders some time in the mid 1980's. To me, this is like me opening a little antique shop and filing a patent on retail stores. Patent law actually has a protection against obvious patents or prior art, so this is a problem with the Patent Office not doing its job, not the law itself.
2) Rapid obsolescence. A patent lasts far too long in the field of sotware. Most software ideas are not worth anything after just a few years. (LZW may be the exception that proves the rule!).
My friends, co-workers, and I have gone round and round on patents for software. The concensus seems to be that applying patents to software is, generally, bad. In those few cases where it isn't totally unreasonable (and I think inventing as powerful a form of data compression as LZW could qualify), the term should be much shorter. We kind of thought an 18-month patent would be reasonable. Since patents are meant to prevent a highly-resourced upstart from profiting before a true innovator can get to market and establish him/herself, and since software can be distributed quickly with hardly any resources required, 18 months should allow one to truly profit from a truly original idea and let the rest of us get our hands on it in a reasonable time.
So, fix the existing patent office and create a new software patent.
Oh yeah, just to point out patent law has a "FSF-like" goal on the back end. To get a patent one must put all details of an invention down on paper and publish it (in the patent itself). When the patent expires, anyone can read the patent and do what the inventor did. It encourages the sharing of ideas. It's just that software moves so much faster than manufacturing that these patents become an excessive burden on all of us.
Finally, Boutell himself posted to this thread with the details on why the gd library was pulled. If you are a moderator (and still reading my verbose screed), I encourage you to read his post and consider moderating it up...
From what I understand, IBM has a compeating claim to the Unisys patent, and there are a couple of other people who also claim patents to the LZW compression algorithm. It is just a nasty minefield, and even paying off Unisys won't help to hold off other potential lawsuits.
And for the folks concerned about this only affecting people in the United States, these patents are protected under the Berne convention and can be prosecuted in Europe as well.
Now that they consider LZW profitable, they continue to make their rounds on enforcing their LZW patent ( Patent #4,558,302). But they didn't always consider it profitable enough to actually enforce. They sat silent as CompServe promoted the GIF 87 standard as an open and free graphic file format. Two years later when the open & free format was revised to GIF 89 and GIF 89a, Unisys continued to sit silent. It wasn't until 1993 when GIF had taken on popularity due to it's free nature that Unisys choose to actually take action. If they had taken action back before 1990 instead of 6 years after GIF's original introduction then programmers/users looking for a free file format would not have accepted GIF/LZW and would have looked for an alternative. By remaining blind to the most popular computer image format in BBS history, Unisys ensured an entrenched critical mass of patent infrigement to tax. If Unisys had available to it an even dirtier and non-professional method of making a buck, I'm glad I haven't heard about it.
The League for Programming Freedom has some good information on the GIF Controversy. And, since there is always two sides to every story, Unisys has written their take on the issue. This document explains their stand on requiring licensing from EVERYONE including for what they refered to as "so-called 'freeware.'" They also have a special email address set aside to answer licensing questions. You may wish to email them to find out more on why they refuse to provide a license which is fair to the "so-called 'freeware'" software developer.
Fortantly, this form of Unisys terror will come to an end. Libungif provides a work-around while resulting in files larger than a xpm or bmp containing the same image. The Unisys action also hopefully will help further promote the use of PNG. Most users of web browsers that don't support PNG have much more to worry about than PNGs showing up as a broken image--the public keys for the SSL Certificate Authorites in non-PNG supporting web browsers have either expired or will expire shortly. Since SSL doesn't cleanly handle expired CA entries, users of non-PNG supporting web browsers may be open to a masqurade attack. And to bring things to an end once and for all, 20 years from the filing date of June 20, 1983, US Patent 4,558,302 expires. I suggest that Slashdot mark June 20, 2003 on it's calendar for a party!
At last, a really smart question on this thread.
There's been a lot of clueless commentary about
copyrights (which are irrelevant).
We recently received a copy of a message from
Unisys to a potential academic GD 1.5 user,
who wanted to enable the LZW_LICENCED option
in GD 1.5. They were informed that, although
they would normally be permitted a free
license for LZW, the use of unauthorized
source code (GD) would expose them to
possible legal action.
We withdrew GD and communicated with Unisys.
We determined that their license terms would
not allow free distribution of source code
for LZW. So we withdrew GD indefinitely until
an all-JPEG-and-PNG version can be created,
which shouldn't take long, with the support
of outside volunteers (that's your cue).
"So why not just go back to run-length-encoded
GIF images in GD?"
Because (a) it's an interesting legal question
whether anything an LZW decoder can decode
is an infringement of the patent or not, and
we don't have a whole lot of dough for legal
fees; and (b) they are big (although the
code for generating them is extremely clever
and I don't mean to criticize the folks at
Hutchison Software Corporation who came up
with the stuff).
"What about decompression?"
All versions of GD contain GIF decompression
support. Some people believe the patent does not
apply to LZW decompression when LZW compression
is not present. Again, this is subject to legal
interpretation, and we are a small company
without a whole lot of dough for legal fees.
"What about your company's internal use of
GD in its products?"
Our products use GD 1.3, on the strength of the
legal arguments above for RLE compression and
for decompression in the absence of compression.
We do this in our own products knowing that
there are a reasonable number of copies out
there for which we can afford to accept legal
responsibility.
For the general public's use of GD, we can't
possibly accept potential liability for untold
zillions of applications.
So, we are working toward a PNG-and-JPEG,
100% open-source version of GD, and we invite
your participation. This will be a version that
does not expose us to legal risk we can't afford,
and which produces better-compressed images
for the end user. I urge everyone following
the controversy to support this option.
Check out the Apostrophe open-source CMS: http://www.apostrophenow.com/
Posted by kewlmann:
I have talked to some people here at Unisys (where I work) about this. They certainly don't see it as a very big issue at all. There idea is that we invented, we can do with it what we want.
I just want to say that anything here is not representative of company policy. It is just my personal opinion.
I have always been told that failing to promptly informing an infringer of a problem will jeopardize any future ability to go after an infringer.
I know that's true of trademarks, but I don't know if it applies to patents.
The problem is, it's expensive to go to court at all these days, whether you're right or wrong. You're not likely to recover court costs even if you win because there is no well defined time frame for abandonment (AFAIK). Even if you could recover the costs, you're out the money until (and if) you get a settlement. The little guy doesn't stand a chance, and big business just swaps patents or figures paying the fees is cheaper than going to court.
It doesn't help that the USPTO likes to dump any real decisions into the court system and simply ASSuMEs that everyone can afford their day in court.
Compuserve created the GIF format and put the specs out for it. The problem is that they did not know that UniSys had the patent on LZW compression. UniSys then waited a LONG time before saying people must pay.
I'm not a GIF file guru but I was told by someone
who is that he's written GIF image tools that
have basic RLE compression, or some other
compression and they're standard GIF image files.
GIF images don't have to use LZW compression.
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
The whole GIF issue IS much older than gd. I was referring to the overall behavior of Unisys.
They pulled their license stunts in the latter half of the '80s. They probably deserved to have their rights stripped at that time. When GIF came out it was: "GIFS are great, everyone use them". Dozens of shareware GIF programs came out without a single word from unisys. Then a few small commercial apps came out, still not a word. Then, nearly all commercial apps supported GIG and suddenly, "That's an infringement on out patent, we demand fees".
Enforcement is still very selective and spotty at best. Apparently based on weighing potential profits and the probability that the latest victim will quietly pay up vs. the big PR black eye if it ever goes to court.
ncompress comes with Red Hat at least and provides the compress/uncompress programs which handle LZW compression. gzip also is compatible with compress'd files, so that too much handle LZW compression. Is there some sort of general license agreement whic Unisys provided for these programs?
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
"Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots." - Jonathan Nolan, Memento Mori
In fact, when it comes to real property, the law already recognizes that if you tolerate trespassing, eventually people acquire an easement to your property. Cases like LZW suggest that this principle should be carried over into IP law.
The problem is that a LOT of people don't use modern browsers. Just look through the access logs at some site to see how many times Netscape 3 (or even 2!) appear. Not to mention IE3 and a lot of wierd browsers that may or my not (probabally not) support png.
People still use GIF because it is supported by ALL graphical browsers, and when you are dealing with 2k files, the compression difference doesn't count for much.
I read the internet for the articles.
PNG does not support animation. I believe there's another format (MNG?) for mini-animations.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Geez, if the government ever needed an example of why file-format patenting is bad, GIF is certainly it. I'm so sick of hearing about one thing or another going under because GIF is proprietary. As has been mentioned here, PNG is nice, and (most importantly) free.
Although I still have yet to see any large number of PNG graphics on the net, it does seem to be a better format than GIF, and netscrape and exploder (claim to) support it. It does everything GIF does, but it also allows more than 256 colours, full alpha, and a few other features. Here's the PNG homepage.
``This, too, shall pass.'' ---Eastern proverb
Use non-lossy jpeg and they'll still look pretty. Not sure how well the compression will work though.
You can get gd1.3.tar.gz from me.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Yes it does.
Yes the gifs are actually not gifs but something like gif but bloody inefficient.
Yes we went through this already (unless the alternative technology using RLE compression has been withdrawn as well).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
What is needed is provisions to prevent preditory patent licensing. To define:
Keeping silent about patent voilations until the use of it becomes nearly ubiquitous, then cash in on others work by coming out from under the rock screaming violation.
Had Unisys claimed patent infringement when GIFs were just beginning, I'll bet GIF would use a different compression standard now. (Or GIF would have been replaced.)
Fraunhoffer (sp?) did the same with MP3 IIRC. For a long time their web page said that they had a patent for the purposes of enforcing standards only (I sure wish I still had that in my cache!). Later, after a number of programmers had put a lot of hard work into implementing a 'free' standard in their software, suddenly Fraunhoffer (sp?) crys infringement.
In both cases, I think it's quite clear that the intent was a sort of bait and switch tactic. If they had advertized in the sunday paper, it would have been illegal in many places.