Slashdot Mirror
Unisys Enforcing GIF Patents
ESR writes "Remember the flap back in 1994-1995 about the GIF
format, with Unisys behaving like jerks over the LZW compression
method and threatening to charge license fees for use of their bogus patent?
Well, brace yourselves. It just got worse. Under
Unisys's new policy, they've gone beyond shaking
down software authors. They're now threatening to sue even noncommercial websites that carry GIFs
for a $5000 license fee, regardless of whether
the GIFs were generated by licensed software or
not.
The gory details are at Don Marti's Burn All GIFs Day site.
Time to convert all your GIFs to some other format. I like PNG
better than JPEG, as it's lossless. The PNG
site carries a gif2png tool that does a good job;
I just used it to clean up my personal website.
GIF animations won't survive the conversion, however...uh, wait. Maybe Unisys just did us
a favor after all... " Here is the Unisys page that started it all.
Sure it does. http://graphicswiz.com/png/pngsuite.html I just checked it with 4.6 for linux and while not all advanced features are supported, the basic PNGs work fine.
I'll be perfectly happy if I never see another animated gif in my life. They are so distracting on web sites!!! Does Netscape/Mozilla have a way to disable them completely?
Procedure for browsing the Web: click on link. wait for page to show. wait for "Stop Animations" to become enabled. click "Stop Animations". read page.
You can create Javascript based animated PNGs -- and I find it works pretty good for most of the audience of my site. Most people that have support for PNG images in there browser also support Javascript.
I really don't mind Javascript-animations -- they aren't as resource intensive as Java (or take 5 minutes to load) and are pretty easy to code.
Finally, Javascript animations are far more flexable then what GIF supports or motion PNG/JPEG images.
A few years ago, Telegrafix (of RipTerm fame) proposed, as a solution to the Unisys LZW patent problem, that the LZW compression be replaced by LZHUF leaving the GIF format otherwise unchanged. This idea was published in an open letter to Compuserv and the online community in general.
This apparently didn't get much attention outside of the BBS community, which at that time was already beginning to lose ground due to growing availability of the Internet.
For anyone who cares, Telegrafix still exists, and is currently promoting the latest incarnation of RipScrip as a vector format for the web. It's interesting, but would be a lot more useful if it were more open. Some folks didn't like RIP back in the BBS days, but I always thought it was a fundamentally good idea that just suffered from being too proprietary.
---
vilvoy
The point is, people should have the choice to decide what they choose to do with their patents. That's nice that einstein and newton wanted to share their ideas, but does this mean everyone has to also? Are you going to force everyone to do what you feel they should do? Why are you so willing to take away people's freedoms?
No, he is saying that if I want his mp3 format I _must_ pay him and that I cannot develop my own mp3 format because he has patented _any_ music compression technique. ie.. "I have a developed a method of compressing music.. I therefore have patented the compression of music". At this point he is saying _if_ you use my format _without_ paying me or you develop your _own_ format, I will force you to stop using this technology. If you don't beleive that forcing people to do things (or not do things) is wrong then we have a conflict of ideas here that would take a *very* long time to resolve.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Gimp doesn't encode GIF's, exactly for this reason.
Another classic example of /.-ers overreacting
a tid=25
without really having aclue.
http://www.evolt.org/index.cfm?menu=8&cid=389&c
I deleted the quicktime plugin-dll from the plugins dir, and it worked. I dont remember which file, but it said which on the PNG-site that was linked to in the article.
www.junkscience.com has the answer to this question and many more.
In the case of TIFFs, there are alternative formats- ZIP in TIFF is the prominent one. Sounds like to me that this will merely get the companies that are providing TIFF file engines to "standardize" on ZIP in TIFF just to get the monkey off their back.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Does this patent apply in Germany? I wouldn't think so.
http://www.cdrom.com/pub/mng/
MSIE5 supports them fine as far as I can tell. (I'm at work), http://graphicswiz.com/png/pngpic2.html looks fine compared to the gif version of it.
Last time I tried to upload a PNG at geocities (that's years ago) they didn't allow me 'because it wasn't a supported extension'. So, you get the idea of the quality of their site.
The suggestion of the abolition of intellectual property being apolitical is laughable. I will not even waste time arguing this. Don't put words into my mouth, I never said you are a marxist if you do not like intellectual property. However, I did say I believed he was a marxist. He said he was an anarchist in his personal information, but I doubt he really knows what he believes, all he knows is he wants to revolt against civilization.
Pharmacutical companies only invest the time/money into drug research because of the legal environment that gives X years free of competition.
The US provides a particularly healthy environment for these companies and they love it - hence the level of pharmacutical research there VS the rest of the world.
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
Don't bother guys, I just got my patent for E=mc2. I can now legally control all nuclear power and have a say when someone wants to detonate a nuke. Thanks for the inspiration UNISYS!!!!!
But do you want to prove it? They could threaten you and you'd have to choke up the $5000 or the effort to exonerate yourself.
Those of the law enforcement profession call this extortion.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Why don't you admit you are a marxist? You believe no one should own property or ideas. Everyone should be forced to work for the good of man kind.
Oh, come off it. I'm not a troll. My evidence follows.
So there! =P
Yes, I do realze that that isn't the kind of troll you ment, but then I don't spend my free time trying to start flame wars on Slashdot eithor, so...
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
The Unisys web page contains instances of question marks where apostrophes should be. This indicates that some Microsoft program was used to construct the HTML. Not only are they assholes, but they look like morons too.
Absolutely, I mean, if I spent several years developing an algorithm like MP3 - I shouldn't have ANY right to make money off my sweat and blood. I should be elated that someone came along, read my code, and distributed it to the whole world. My family didn't need to be fed this year. Tom
More like you speant years developing an algorithm like MP3 for your software. Then when you release it, a dozen people sue you into oblivion for using "a method of reducing the size of a file which encodes audio by reducing the amount of data encoded into the file in such a weay that the listner can still recognise that a sound was recorded", and "A method for distributeing a sound by means of a device which follows instructions encoded into a stream of binary values", and finally, use of "a method to induce people to give you money in exchange for something they want for their computing device".
All invalid, and all backed by more money than you've ever seen in your lifetime, and all willing to make an example of you at a loss so others will toe the line.
IMHO, unless of until this whole mess can be fixed, most people would be better off without patents existing at all.
Look at . It looks like this is a ploy to rev up their earnings and find some growth since they are all fresh out of new ideas. It's what you'd expect from a firm that has become a dinosaur which survives off of legacy technologies. This is proof they are a has-been and a bottom feeder. Say, what was that os that lived in old Sperry iron anyway?
hmm.... it appears that i'm wrong. GNU just don't use GIF's on their website
Below is copy of an e-mail I sent to Don, the person who runs burnallgifs.org.
Don,
I happen to work for Unisys and disagree with some of the comments on your site. Before I get into explaining them, I would like tell you a bit about myself. I am not your average Unisys guy. I a 22 year old May '99 graduate of West Chester University, who has been with Unisys since January '99. Before that I did financial software for three years. I am not some old Unisys lover who has been with company since Univac.
First, Unisys is still a well known computer company. We have over 34,000 employees in over 100 countries, our stock is up and if you want a server that never crashes you have to go to us or IBM. That is fact is well known. Our clients are States (PA recently made news with Unisys) and Countries (we recently made a multi-billion dollar deal with Spain).
If the problem is "a flaw in the US patent system" then what did Unisys do that was so wrong? If a company invests its time and money into something that then it should be able to charge for it. This is one way in which programmers actually get paid for their work and can thus earn a living doing what they love. I just can't see a problem with that. As for the license fee, it is obvious that vendors still have a choice and can use other formats should they not want to pay. What is the problem? Imagine if you didn't get paid for the work you do.
Next, the MCP article is almost a year old, meaning it proves nothing. From your remarks, it seems that you do not even know what MCP is.
You are wrong about Unisys not "inventing anything since long before the web." My own group is in the process of getting a patent. It involves off loading I/O (TCP/IP, Raid) processing from a host system on to an intelligent adapter. Our cellular multiprocessing (CMP) architecture is a completely new and innovative invention. Actually, we invent things pretty often around here.
Your next quote comes from Giga Information Group, not Unisys. It was only re-published with Giga's permission (did you obtain it?). The environment they talk about is Microsoft Windows Terminal Server with Citrix WinFrame. Neither of these are Unisys products. In fact, there is a lot of Unisys development done to address the weaknesses in Microsoft Windows NT to try to make it more like our main frames.
Unisys is not "counting on the legal department as the main revenue source." Our Services group brings in over half our seven billion dollar revenue. Our Computer Systems group brings in the rest.
If you are going to attack something, please learn a bit more about it first. Otherwise your argument falls flat on its face.
-- soldack
http://www.estinc.com/images/menu/nav_on_Est_Home. png
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
It's about time someone got this format killed off.
It does have it's niche for small size web graphics. But there are other, newer, better, more open formats that can do the job just as well.
I think the biggest potential negative effect this might lead to is the appearance of multiple new formats. We already have way more than enough; I don't think there's much need for more than 2 or 3 bitmap and 2 or 3 vector formats. (BTW it sure would be nice for browsers to support a vector format or two).
mdm
You shouldn't be able to patent code, software technologies and the like. You can copyright them, but you have no right to patent them.
---Got Coffee?---
>because to display the gif you would have to use
>their algorithm.
This is just plain wrong. The Webserver NEVER uses the LZW scheme!! The browser receives the image STILL compressed, and then uncompresses it. They are trying to charge you even though you, as a web-hoster, may NEVER have used their algorithm! You don't have to use LZW to take a compressed GIF, download it from somewhere, and put it on your page... you only use LZW if YOU create or view the gif.
This scheme you lay out is not reasonable, because it involves people paying licensing fees while potentially never using the licensed technique.
However, if they use your GIF Proxy, then YOU, running the GIF Proxy, ARE using the LZW patent, and ARE liable.
So you take a situation where no liability actually exists, and create a situation where liability is present. I'm sure Unisys would love you for that.
Howard C. Shaw III Grum
This doesn't disappoint me too much - gif was way outdated as it is.
Hold on? Perhaps they ARE being nice to us after all - I mean, it takes so long to get old deprecated crap out of the worlds computers (Win3.1, etc) - maybe this is the fast track way out of the whole "backwards compatibility" bind!
UPGRADE OR I'LL SUE!!!
Excuse me, but I thought I read somewhere that patents could become invalid if the process became public knowledge. I have seen unlicensed source code for GIFs floating around for years, and I would be surprised if there arn't people out there who couldn't code a GIF compressor/decompressor with their eyes closed. I think it is past time a court stuck down this idiotic patent.
holy crap...mac os X's native document format is PDF!!
holy crap!!
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
This doesn't disappoint me too much - gif was way outdated as it is.
Hold on? Perhaps they ARE being nice to us after all - I mean, it takes so long to get old deprecated crap out of the worlds computers (Win3.1, etc) - maybe this is the fast track way out of the whole "backwards compatibility" bind.
UPGRADE OR I'LL SUE!!!
Hell, that'll work for me!
Has nothing to do with Freon.
Mother nature herself dumped more Chlorine into the upper atmosphere than we did throughout all of Freon's life in one massive eruption of mount Penitubo (SP?) years back. Enough, using the theories given about Freon to eradicate the Ozone layer once and for all- no hole, just no Ozone layer. Guess what- no eradication. No massive enlargement of the "hole". What does that do to the Freon theories? Why did nobody tell you all about this eruption or what it did? Vested interests.
Clue 1: Freon is heavier than air. How in the hell does it get up to the Ozone layer?
Clue 2: The international ban on Freon production goes into effect the very second DuPont's international patents run out on Freon.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Hello Folks,
I think it's time for us to accelerate our anti-unisys propagenda. Start by vocing out our concers, making web sites (like the burngifs web site), telling people away from UNISYS products, in favor of other, better products. Calling your local rep and educating them about software patents and the horror that comes from it (give Unysis as an example). Put a UNY$I$ Sucks logo on your bumper. On all your sites put a link to a prominant non-gif site (like gnu.org) and copy gnu.org's anti-gif policy statement and use it. Use PNG. Write nice and clean letters to the executive branch at UNISYS and demand (nicely) that they back down, reason with them, (like you do with kids), explain to them what a Network is, then what an Internet is, then what GIF represents. Show them how foolish they are. Show them how they are putting the community against them, which would, in the end bring about their downfall. Tell them about other companies that had ventured into this arena and had god eaten alive by the nerds.
Power to the nerds!
--
Right?
--
--
=8^
PNG support pretty much sucks in all current browsers. (Atleast the ones people actually use) Here is a list of features supported in diffirent browsers: http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngapbr.html Good overall information about PNG: http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/
GIF/LZW patent is not enforcable here in the U.K.
Just come and host your GIF's on our servers! Thanks to UNISYS, we just found another way to market our servers against the US competition!
We've produced strong crypto software, stuff which output's LZW gifs etc. I don't know how US companies manage to stay afloat with lawsuits flying left right and centre!
I saw the UNISYS building here in the UK recently and boy is it ugly!
Does this patent apply in Germany? I wouldn't think so.
Unisys evidently does think so. Look at the first paragraph of their LZW FAQ -- they assert patents in the US, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the UK.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
I don't think that that would be a goos idea because Postscript is a format for quality printing. JPEG compression is not meant for quality printing and I suspect PNG isn't either. Anyone heard about PNG coding? I read somewhere that it used a logarithmic scale which I think reduces the quality of the image and that could be noticeable on the printed image.
Please, anyone correct me if I'm wrong.
But AFAIK, PNG is still not viewable in latest browsers? Not on the Mac at least.
Xah
xah@best.com
http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html
PNG is lossless and therefore doesn't reduce the quality of the image it was used to compress.
It's a format with a whopping 256 color palette. It's so out of date right now that I'm surprised its survived as long as it did. I assume that people keep them around because of the possibilty of animated gifs (hooray -- annoying banner ads and cheezy clip art).
:)
PNG is far superior in most respects. I'm surprised its taken so long to catch on. I assume that this new Unisys move is going to help it get bigger.
æeee!
I'll chip in $5 plus postage and handling. Please tell me I'm not the only one. (Hehe... somebody's USPS mail box is going to be feeling the slashdot effect)
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Maybe this means we can fianlly get decent support for PNG/MNG in IE/Mozilla w/out needing those lame ass plugins. Maybe PNG will become popular and MNG will actually reach real people! Oh my GAWD I'm breaking a sweat! Please, please, do it!
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
As nice as it might sound to get rid of those damn animated GIFs as banner ads, this might lead to something far more annyoing and evil: Java banner ads.
(shudder)
Besides GIF, are there any other formats that support animation? From what I understand (which may be false), animation was tacked on to the GIF format after a while; could the same thing be done to PNG (or even JPEG)?
-ElJefe
FWIW, here is the situation regarding PNG on Mac browsers:
Guy Ouellette
guy.ouellette@NOSPAM.ri.cgocable.ca
If they are done right (which I know they won't), they can be very cool. I came across a Sun Banner-Ad which had a little game of break-out built into it. The thing loaded in no-time and was amusing. When you win, the ball goes around the window and eventually becomes the 'dot' in sun.com.
The solution is quite simple, really (if a little rude).
Remove all support for displaying GIF images from all future versions of Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, and the like. If you want your web page viewable by the next generation of browsers, DON'T use GIF images. It would be quite simple to strangle Unisys at the source, by making the outdated format which uses their obsolete algorithm inaccessible to most users.
Those requiring lossless compression could use PNG. Otherwise, JPG is kinder to bandwidth anyway. As for animations -- I believe there are a number of non-GIF methods for supporting them if they are really that necessary (a debatable point).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Actually, we are getting into storage area networks. That is one of the main targets of our RAID card. The main point of my post was that the burnallgifs.org site had not really researched Unisys. Many things that were on that site were just plain incorrect. I see nothing wrong with a company working within the system to protect its interests. I *DO* see a problem with the US patent law that allows it. Is it better to attack one company that is tacking advantage of it or to fix the problem from ever occuring? Do you think that Unisys is the only company to take advantage of patent law?
-- soldack
Another important thing to think about:
A format doesn't suck because it has less support than other formats. If that were true then everyone should go back to using ASCII for documents because, ahem, EVERY platform has support for rendering ASCII perfectly.
PNG is a superior image format in many ways; instead of shouting nonsense like "PNG SUCKS", how about encouraging more people to use modern browsers that are PNG-aware. You'll also be looking at a size savings, since PNGs are more compact, on average, than GIFs.
Nothing worth doing is worth doing today.
You shouldn't have to... LZW is a compression algorithm and there is no way to tell if a given image was compressed with a program that licensed the algorithm from Unisys.
There's been a lot of talk about Unisys forcing you to disclose what program(s) you use to create your GIFs. I really don't think this is feasible. On my Mac, I have at least 10 different programs capable of saving GIFs or compressing images with LZW--everything from Photoshop 5.5 to GIF Builder to Quark. Gods, if you count programs that use QuickTime, that number pops up to 25-30.
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
That was not an argument. I asked a question, then provided statements which I believed he asserted in order for him to correct them, if I was incorrect in assuming them. Your attempt to discredit me with your proof that my "argument" is logically unsound has failed. I did not bother to read the rest of your post because it seems like you want me to defend someone elses words.
If Unisys is asking for too much money, then don't use their format. What are you complaining about? You have alternatives. Use other graphics formats, use java for animation. You are charging $50,000 for your product for the same reason Unisys is charging for theirs. Both your company and Unisys put money into something and want to see a return on that investment. The high price is as simple as supply and demand. If nobody demanded GIF then Unisys would not charge as much.
-- soldack
PDF can also utilize Flate compression (zlib).
. One thing that GIF has that PNG lacks is animation (I think). Of course for a website there is always javascript for that, but that sucks..
They have MNG, as you may have seen mentioned a few times on this topic.
For example, Paint Shop Pro 5 comes with Animation Shop to make your animated GIFs. It supports animated GIFs as well as MNG. I always save my original work in MNG format since it has no 256 color ceiling and no compression,etc. Unfortuantely for use in the real world, the MNG file will be exponentially longer than a rendered GIF would.
Some operators of Intranet and Billboard Web sites have had difficulty determining whether they need a license from Unisys for use of our LZW patented technology. If you use any of the types of images specified above on your Web site that you received from an unlicensed software developer
or service, you should have a license from Unisys to use the LZW patent. Or even if the developer
or service provider has a license, but it doesn't cover your use of the particular application you
received, you should have a license from Unisys to use the LZW patent.
Well I'm glad that cleared that up.
Whats really interesting is if you read theirlicensing definitions apparently this $5000 dollar license is strictly for noncommercial websites. Commercial websites need to negotiate the license seperatly for each case. This could easly lead to Unisys choosing to apply a heavy hand to some and not to others.
For the LAST time, HTML is NOT PLAINTEXT! :-)
"Does Unisys actually make anything important these days?"
Actually Unisys software and hardware are used many goverments and large financial institutions. I would call that important.
-- soldack
I've read that many times before and it never held true for me. Famous for being famous people (celebrities, on e!, etc..) might get a agree, but if it was revealed my town's mayor was a KKK member - few people would vote for him - and his life would be pants.
--
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
I don't think Unisys would care too much about that program (except perhaps the decoder part) since it would take on the order of 10^(10^10) cycles per image.
If you convert to png, you should probably let unisys know how you feel about their so called patent. Why not email each of your old gifs to their address: LZW_INFO@unisys.com. The /. effect would be interesting! By the way, isn't $5000 the maximum permitted for small claims court? Perhaps UNISYS intends to send an army of employees out to attack us via small claims court! I don't know about you guys, but it is starting to look like the US bogus software patent problem is the single biggest threat open source has ever faced. I'm scared.
Ok, so I've converted all my website's GIFs to PNG with gif2png. Unfortunately the transparency doesn't convert, so I had to go through and use Gimp to make them transparent again. Only it doesn't work. In Netscape the transporent are looks white, and in IE it looks gray. Is this because I'm doing something wrong in Gimp? Or can the current browsers not handle transparency in PNG yet?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
With an election comming up, a lot of politicans are posting web sites. When ever you see one, make sure they know that they owe 5k$ to unisys, and that you will report them. Once they start getting bit, then maybe Congress will kill all the absurd software patents.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Here's the problem I have with all of this. I run a small web hosting business out of my house, and I DEPEND on free and opensource software to do this.
I have no problem changing all the gifs on my servers and all the related html, HOWEVER...
Because of my dependance on free software (and automatically created images), I now have to worry about programs I have that generating gif images to display information like Webalizer & MRTG.
My clients expect Web statistics for thier sites, so doing without is not an option.
Am I going to have to go and buy my software now (shudder)???
----Never underestimate the power of human stupidity----
While plenty of browsers support PNG now, how many support the alpha channel bits? Or graphics packages for that matter?
:)
This is a serious question - last I looked nothing really could display alphachannel PNGs and the tools I was using (Photoshop 4 mainly) didn't create them, even though Photoshop in particular has a pretty good concept of transparency.
I would really like to be using this feature!
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
Management wanted to use an ActiveX plugin, but between the cross platform and other problems, they headed in the direction of using images. I tried various options to GIF, but the computer generated charts that looked like crap with JPG, and the particular industry the product targeted had a high percentage of 3.0 browsers that didn't support PNG format. As a last resort I approached Unisys to get an estimate for licensing costs.
The wierd part was, when I read the Unisys legal papers, the only licensing fees mentioned in the document were %1 of the sale price of the product. After my client's lawyer called the Unisys lawyer the fee suddenly changed to $20,000 per shipped copy of our product, with Unisys insisting they bill our customers directly, reserving the right to charge more for larger web sites.
When I asked about the descrepancy between the actual contract language and the $20,000 figure I was told not to worry about it since I was just a programmer and not a lawyer. I simply don't see how any reasonable company would charge a $20,000 royalty for a $50,000/copy product, and wonder if there's some other entity at Unisys between the people making business decisions and the people enforcing the patent, i.e., skimming off the top?
ROFLOL - If I were a moderator I would bump this up for funniness!
In my job, I work with a legal department (won't name names, but you could probably find it by looking at my old posts
"Holding things up" really does seem to be the job of legal, though of course they recieve plenty of assistance from our loyal gub'mint.
heh.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
> And for every Windows that rears it's ugly head, there is a Wine. :)
And about a million more whines. Sorry, couldn't resist.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> Now, to make a program that scans through all HTML files replacing gif with PNG
;)
Well, BBedit does a bang up job if ya got a Mac lying around
Aren't there any big Search-and-Replace text editors in *nix?
pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
JPEG is lossy because it discards high frequencies. Is it right?
PNG doen't discard data but it uses a logarithmic scale which could make an effect similar to a quantization. Anyone knows if is this right?
kato wrote:
contact the Unisys Licensing Department at 215-986-5693 (or fax at 215-986-3090) to ensure that you're safe. If they expect me to pay anything, I'll be sure to keep whoever answers the phone talking for a couple hours.
If you've got a toll-free number for us, more people will do it. I, for one, can't afford to pay for hours of cross-country long distance phone charges, even for a good cause.
----
----
Open mind, insert foot.
It stores the same data as an identical TIFF, so it wouldn't print any differently.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Though I wholly agree that PNG is a better format, you're not going to see major sites switching over to png any time soon. Why? The market support isn't their. I'm not about to cut-out 90% of my audience simply because it's the "right thing" to do.
Comparing the GIF/PNG issue to WindowsNT/Linux battle is not an accurate comparisson. A web browser could care little if your server is running WindowsNT, Linux, MacOS X, etc. It does care, though, if it is getting a png or a gif.
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Unisys dropped out of R&D back in 1993 like everyone else and switched to consulting. They have no interest in a GIF patent.
I think ONE thing will come of it -- Unisys will get even more bad PR.
But then there are those who say there is no such thing as bad publicity...
In realizing that I could now be held liable for damages, I sent the following e-mail to the LWZ team at Unisys: "I was interested in your LZW licensing information. I recall a few years ago numerous stories popping up about your company enforcing patents on LZW technology. As my 400kb 'billboard' site on a free host falls within your definition. I feared retailiation from your company. Thus, I decided to purchase a $10 client from an independent web developer that produces JPEG images. "I'd like to thank you for saving me $5,000-7,000 dollars that I would have been required to spend had I kept up the one 10kb GIF image that I had on my web site. I do hope that your company continues to keep up the good work enforcing patents." Seeing as how Unisys is more concerned about lost revenue than keeping customers, I'd be happy to kill off any GIFs that I have that make my photos look less than humanlike. I hope that the millions of dollars they spend trying to kill public web sites makes up for the little customer base that they'll ever have.
There is what is called a comment extension to GIF. A number of software applications that make GIFS put a comment extension in the GIF that tells what software made the GIF. I know Photoshop does this.
PNGs compress better in *only* one case: 256 colors. 128 colors GIF and 256/PNG are about the same, everything less GIF performs better.
There's a vast difference between having an honest to god alpha channel and a simple transparent color. PNG's /do/ still compress better,
No way! A PNG with a full alpha channel never compresses nearly as good as a "transparent" GIF, except for pathological cases.
and an alpha'd PNG image will look antialiased against whatever background you put it against,The same can be done with alpha'd GIFs. There really is no difference between GIF/PNG in a'aliasing Images to the background. PNG can do it in the File Data, it can be done to GIFs after decoding. Of course there is a difference between full alpha and a single transparent color, but that was not the point.
I can do without animations.
Believe it or not, GIFs can be encoded as stills without any animation! But when you need animation, GIFs are often a good choice - as opposed to Java or Javascript tricks.
The next time, please think first, then speak. Or shut up altogether - you would do many people a favor.
... must not care about PNG or JPEG. :)
no no no, real vi doesn't understand %
Like MNG the Merciless?
MNG!
MNG!
MNG!
MNG!
MNG!
MNG!
MNG!
This will be unenforcable as GIFs have been widely used for years and years and Unisys did nothing during those years to stop their use. Basically, GIFs are in the public domain and Unisys can't do anything about it.
Ummm.... in the United States the burden of proof would be on Unisys.
This doesn't sound like my understanding of the patent. They have a claim on the compression/decompresion algorithm, not the output.
I agree 100%! Unfortunatly, that doesn't stop them from going to court. Court would almost certainly cost more than $5000. Personally, I'll just migrate away from GIF until the patent runs out. PNG and MNG will hopefully have taken over that niche by then anyway.
...and make millions! Buwahahaha!
Methinks that Unisys is having some serious cash troubles to do something as stupid as this.
Time to dump your Unisys stock.
Send them to Microsoft's website. Maybe they'll just chew on each other for a while and leave the rest of us alone.
--
QDMerge 0.21!
how to invest, a novice's guide
Since Netscape 4.04 and IE 4, PNG is natively supported (at least on Winblows). They still don't handle alpha channels correctly, but we can live without that.
Hello! The guy specifically stated he was using a Mac, so support under Windows don't mean shit to him!
> I'm glad that all the important scientific discoveries were made before we had patents and intellectual property.
You honestly believe this? This is just so unbelievably laughable that I just can't bring myself to argue with any of the other points. I don't have the skill to debate anyone who exists on another plane of reality, sorry.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Oh well, our gain. :-)
If I understand it correctly, most Linux software (as shipped with US distributions anyway) does not come with LZW code. Rather than libgif, they use libungif, which only does RLE compression. As such, GIFs created in this way are not in violation of UNISYS' patent.
Well, in an ideal world, yes. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world. (Just ask any physics student...) The point of creating the patent system was to encourage the exchange of ideas and to stimulate innovation. If an inventor created something useful, the government would grant him exclusive rights over the idea for a reasonable amount of time in exchange for the inventor publishing full documentation on his invention, thereby allowing anyone to fully use the idea after the time ran out. Expressly excluded from the patent system were mathematics and ideas that did not result in a physical result.
Back to modern times. The patent office allows the patenting of software algorithms, which, in many cases are almost purely mathematical. The patents still run for 17 years, which, while it was a reasonable period of time in the era when patents were created, is several eternities in today's world of software development. And finally, the patent office allows long, convoluted patents that end up boiling down to things like, "A Patent On The Creation Of A Dialog Box For The Purpose Of Asking The Software User A Question."
No, the patent system as it was conceved was not a bad thing, and it was created with the best of intentions. Today's patent system, however, has strayed far from the original ideal, and has become just a method whereby companies with lots of money create unbreakable monopolies for themselves in areas so broad that practally any piece of software could infringe on someone else's patent.
--Phil (there's a really great article on software patents floating around, but I can't remember the URL.)
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
Actually their stockholders are by and large, probably wholly ignorant of the whole fiasco, and if they know anything about it, they are clucking their tongues and sighing at silly legal departments trying to squeeze licenses out of end-of-life intellectual property. Because that's what legal departments *do*, among their other jobs. R&D develops, Marketing pushes it out, Sales keeps it rolling, Legal holds it up. Sometimes Marketing wants R&D to keep leveraging old tech, sometimes they push for the impossible. Sales wants Marketing to transfer technology the market won't accept, or find new ways to sell the same junk in different colors. Legal tries to find ways to create licenses for products that are only marginally theirs (e.g. IBM has a patent on LZW too) and tries to keep leveraging IP when it has long since become commoditized. Every department has a shifting concept of what's important now, and they don't all overlap.
Welcome to the weird world of corporations.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
...AH-AH... KING OF THE IMPOSSIBLE!
Yeah suck it hard unisys, your punny little fucked up format wont run on this mutt.
What you mean is MJPEG commpresion, which is basically every frame a Jpeg image. But mpeg doesnt have this.
One of the things that mpeg has is ability to have a keyframe every few frames.. think of a keyframe as a jpeg image.. the other frames inbetween keyframes are differential frames. they store only what are the changes between frames.
This allows to save alot of space, as often frames are almost the same. Now the changes per frames are saved only for sections that have changes. Next the frame is split into a 8x8 pixels boxes, and the framechanges note where did those boxes move to (to save even more space).
Not all mpeg compressors use this keyframe thing (I heard xing doesnt do it, but then many people dont appreciate xing for quality, but speed only)
Anyways... so mjpeg is really similiar to an mpeg with every frame being keyframe.. its easy...
doing keyframe every 3 frames improves quality per file size ratio, but on the other hand for fast pased sequences you can see some artifacts (but then its fast paced, so the artifacts change very fast as well).. this is the point that I heard few people complain about DVDs.
anyways... hope this clears the confusion a bit..
I love Slashdot. Anytime something goes wrong, we've got 1,000,000,000 geeks running to correct it. Anyone seen PCU? Here's the analogy: clueless idiot (the bad company) accidently trips over the server box (does some stupid action). Then, 1,000,000,000 people chase after him (the Slashdot community) to avenge what's right. Most of the time, that I've seen anyhoo, after being 'Slashdotted,' the company buckles under when confronted with it's own stupidity.
Gotta Love Slashdot!
I'm sorry. What I meant to say was 'please excuse me.'
what came out of my mouth was 'Move or I'll kill you!'
No, he means that when you follow a link that leads to an image zgv is executed to show you the image. Images embeded in html will still show up as [IMAGE] for all those sites that think netscape/msie are the only browsers on the planet.
-matt
"It Pissed me off that decnt, good or sometimes even great Techonigies get killed/stunned because
of greedy ass companies trying to squezze an extra cent out of their product. "
Sure, but what does that have to do with GIF?
This is a case where a stupid, short-sighted company is killing off a shitty excuse for a graphics format.
I'm going to send them a thank-you note.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
(eh?)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Don't forget that the extra time it takes to cool the non-CFC truck means it pumps out more pollution. ie. The CFC filled truck would have been a "better" deal for the environment...
It is actually very
:(
simple to provide both PNG (or JPEG) and GIF versions
of images on web sites. Use content negotiation: if
requesting browser supports image/png, then have HTTP server send a PNG image,
if not, then send image/gif.
If this had been done earlier, we would all have switched
to PNG by now.
If Unisys decides to file a lawsuit against you for using GIF's, any intelligent judge can realize that the patent is completely bogus. And really, JPEG is too large a format to use everywhere, and PNG isn't widely enough supported yet. Unisys can kiss my ass, I'm keeping my gifs and I'm not buying a stupid license! 3D Alpha
This is crap. How can a SOFTWARE patent apply to data files transfered over the Web???
It will never stand.
And I'll admit that my desk seems smaller today... Or is it all the junk piled up reducing the amount of free space making it seem that way? The final point: Unless you measure the amount of frogs then you can't legitimately say "there's less". Perhaps the day(s) you went there the frogs had better things to do than look at you... >;-)
PNG in and of itself does not suck--the implementation of PNG sucks. Netscape and Microsoft can't even make their browsers render CSS competently so I don't expect them to do any better with a graphic format. (OT: Anybody remember IE3's CSS support? Sure... an em is equal to a px.)
BTW, you should be able to convert your Web site on the fly. Use Debabelizer or the GIMP (I think) to convert your images to png. Now use grep and change all instances of .gif to .png. Simple.
Am I doing this? Nope. Why? The market support for PNG is not present. I will not alienate 80-90% of web users just because Unisys is throwing a tantrum. I honestly want PNG, if not just for the 8-bit alpha channel.... it's just that the support is not there.
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
sed
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Why would any company,
especially one which does have a clue and has been around before the "The Net is for exploitation" additude by most companies. Something like this is illogical for the company, I think they were misquoted, maybe even purposely. I could understand if they would crack down on people using their software w/o prior licensing...
yeah yeah, Open Source etc. I love OpenSource, but most companies still earn their bacon diffrently.
It almost sounds like a disgruntled programmer who created an image editor which he did not buy a license for and was shut down. So he wants the entire world to take a patent were he does not have to pay royalties and then bring out his software...
maybe I'm just naturally distrustful of human nature...but maybe I just might have a point
Peter K
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
vi index.html
:1,$s/.gif/.png/g
Any ideas?
TedC
Anyone wanna guess how long the average /. reader would stand up in court against a team of $500/hour corporate lawyer types.
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
I'm not a lawyer but...I know something about patent law. While I may be incorrect, the following is probably true:
First off, in order for them to sue they have to file a cease and dissist order, which would be very expensive and difficult to file against every website in the US. (Is 5k really going to cover all of the lawyer expenses in a lawsuit?)
Second, I don't remember the term, but there are laws governing the lapse of patents, and special cases. The best way to explain what I am talking about is the example of Scope. Scope (the mouthwash product) took years to develop, and market to the general public. After development the company patented the product, as you can expect. You may ask yourself, "then why are there nock off scope brands?" Because scope can't do a thing about it now. If one of the nock off brands happens to be a Scope distributor (A major supermarket for example) then Scope and it's parent company wouldn't want to sue them. After a period of time Scope legally CANT sue them. So if your website has been around, and you've been using the patent without them complaining... Wait until they file suit. That's what me and my four domain names are doing...
-Woil
A quick check at http://www.patents.ibm.com/ibm.html Patent- US05469161 issued-11/21/1995 Algorithm for the implementation of Ziv-Lempel data compression using content addressable memory It seems the patent was issued less than 10 years ago.
Yeah I agree. Some of the Java banners I've seen have actually been pretty cool. When the idea has been gotten right its like moving from a passive (like TV) to more interactive (like the Internet).
:)
Of course, some people will still hate ads no matter what
My, what an interesting and compelling argument. I wonder if you'd like to repeat it non-anonymously...
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
pdf is open, you troll. go write your own viewer. the format is extensible, so i would be very surprised if it could not handle jpg and png images.
sc
Hrm, topiclinux.gif, topicnews.gif... before Slashdotters go out and raise the hackles at Unisys, perhaps Slashdot should clean up it's own act in regard to Gifs since you are now a bit more of a High Profile Corporate Entity. I'd hate to see you be the test case for this.
You're not the only one
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
Not entirely. In civil cases (anything brought on by someone who isn't the government), the accusing party only has to prove that it's more likely that you did than it is that you didn't. Basically they have to convince you 51% that they are right. So if you are brought to court in a civil matter you pretty much have to prove that you are inocent. Hence why OJ got off in the criminal charges but not on the civil charges.
-matt
Err, I share my office with the guy who last overhauled the EST Inc. web site. I assure you that those are PNG images on the left menu. The version of GIMP that he uses doesn't even support GIF due to the patent issue.
The banner ads and such, though, are animated GIF's. Those all come from an outside graphics artist, and basically we go with what he sends us.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I'm inlcined to agree that this has been blown a little out of proportion. I've submitted an article to evolt.org= 25
http://evolt.org/index.cfm?menu=8&cid=389&catid
that I hope paints a slightly clearer picture of the situation.
A little planning goes a long way...
Did you guys see this on the Burn All GIFs Website ? Seriously LOL. What about the Master Control Program? As we all know, Tron has already defeated the MCP. Unisys, however, will continue to invest in MCP at least through the end of 2000, proving that they are complete idiots who haven't invented anything since long before the web.
In Germany, at any rate (I don't know about anywhere else), the preferred method for counting hits on Web pages is an Apache module that generates a 1x1 transparent GIF on the page to be measured. This helps bypass many of the problems of miscounting hits due to caching and proxying, because browsers usually have image auto-load turned on and do not cache CGI output, so that the hit on the GIF is measured on the server side every time the page is loaded; and yet the bandwidth required is very low.
The results of this procedure are managed by an independent organization called IVW (you'll have to be able to read German). All of the major commercial Web sites in Germany participate -- you can view last month's ratings there. These statistics determine where millions of marks will go -- they are like the Nielsen ratings of the commercial Web in Germany, informing advertisers about the impact of a site and hence how much a site can charge for banner space.
Unisys' attempt at gold-digging could have staggering consequences in Germany. Are they going to demand $5000 from every major commercial Web site in the country? Or are they going after the developers of the hit-counting software? If so, I'd suspect that they would view them as one of their "case-by-case" cases and argue that they get more than $5000, say a cool million or two, or maybe ten. Since Unisys is going so far as to threaten Joe Blow for the GIFs on his personal Web page, I wouldn't put it past them to shoot for the stars if they find out that GIFs are being used this way. This could have the makings of an international incident.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
I don't like this idea at all. Not one cent in tribute!
Ok if that is what he is saying then good, I guess.. but if you patent something you are saying "no technology may be developed that infringes on this patent without my approval" which includes new formats. If he wants to charge money for his format then people are not required to use his format, they can always go and develop a new one. As such, I claim that for every technology that you currently claim the right to charge for will eventually be developed by someone who is willing not to charge money for it. But unfortunately it will probably be a "derivative work" which I'm sure you will claim you have a right to continue charging for. This doesn't capture my thought, I claim that if you hadn't developed this technology with the intention of charging money for it then someone else would have developed it without that intention, because assumably the technology has some worth (it is good for something, say compressing music) that people will want and they will develop it for those reasons, not just for moneytry gain.
I really like compiler optimisations.. I work on em all the time. I develop compiler optimisations because I want my code to be faster and more compact. When I create a good compiler optimisation I give it to everyone because then when they give me their programs they will be smaller and faster because they will be using my optimisations. Some people develop compiler optimisations to make their compiler better than a competitor's. That way people will pay them for the compiler instead of the other guy. I claim that if they don't develop compiler optimisations and sell them, I will continue to develop compiler optimisations regardless, and as such, anything they develop will eventually be discovered by me (compiler optimisations are a pretty restrictive field, there's only so much stuff you can do). For this reason I don't think they have a right to restrict the use of the optimisations to their compiler, because eventually I would have developed it and given it to everyone. However, they can do a very optimial implementation of the algorithm and refuse to give out the source code. They are free to not share information, they are just not free to stop me from sharing information. Copyright violates this.
How we know is more important than what we know.
>vi index.html
>:1,$s/.gif/.png/g
No, we are talking about regex find and replace on all text files in a directory tree. Try not to be a moron.
unix brew idiots. they think find and replace on a single file is worth being proud of.
Xah
xah@best.com
http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html
It was my opinion that decompressing the GIF was a use of the LZW algorithm.. ie, LZW = compression and decompression. Am I incorrect? If so the situation above it not justifiable.
(note that I mean justifiable from their perspective).
How we know is more important than what we know.
You can't compare the specs of each format as written, you have to compare how they are in the real world of browser support. That's what defines the suitability of something for the Web, and that's where the two formats compete.
... years after the GIF patent issue came up, PNG support is JUST GETTING STARTED.
Alpha Channel
GIF: 1-bit PNG: none
(note: I'm talking browser support)
Animation
GIF: yes PNG: no
Universally Viewable
GIF: yes PNG: no
Image Swaps
GIF: yes PNG: not when viewed with a Plug-in
Right now there are billions of animated GIF banner ads and transparent GIF images that cannot be replaced with PNG. There are billions of JavaScript rollovers that cannot be replaced with PNG without being Windows-only.
The problem is that Web standards are at a standstill at the client level. Microsoft killed the commercial browser market and the free one (as in open, not free as in price) hasn't really started yet. Until then, we have universal support for JPEG, GIF, tables, font tags, JavaScript 1.0 and all the other junk that's left over from when the Web was young. Anything newer is spotty. What Unisys is doing is just exposing that flaw
I beleive I explain clearly what I beleive, Authority = bad.
How we know is more important than what we know.
There are many books with the printed source code to GIF's LZW compression scheme. Some dating back to the 1980's. What can Unisis do, force a recall?
And then the source code to LZW itself is spread far and wide. It's in libraries written in C, in plain C code, plain PASCAL code, heck, even QBASIC code! It's too far wide-spread.
The courts are going to have a field day when this hits the fan.
In addition, I hear that IBM also has a patent on LZW too. This may be a rumor, but wouldn't that invalidate Unisis' claims?
---
Spammed? Click here for free slack on how to fight it!
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
A CFC is relatively inert molecule. Under exposure to ultreaviolet light, the CFC liberates a chlorine free radical. It is this free radical that does most of the damage, destroying ozone in a chain reaction.
2. How did get up into the ozone layer?
Convection. The atmosphere is hardely static. As I said, a CFC compound is relatively inert. The journey to the stratosphere is likely to take years, but the molecule will probably survive the journey, intact.
3. What about other chlorine compounds released by volcanoes?
Most Chlorine compounds released by a volcano are in the form of relatively non stable HCl gas. Most of this material does not enter the stratosphere. Major eruptions can "inject" HCl into the stratosphere, but such eruptions are relatively rare (once a decade). The eruption from Mt Pinatubo is, at the most, of the same magnitude as a years worth of human sources.
4. Why is there an ozone "hole", rather than a ozone "thinning?"
Beats me. I'm not a metereologist, although apparently, the extreme cold of the (ant)arctic environment causes more ice crystals to form which act as some sort of catylyst for the ozone depletion chain reaction.
Your article on evolt spreads outdated information -- because Unisys changed their minds since the "Unisys Clarifies Policy" article you reference was published. Unisys has revoked their freeware exception and has been actively going after freeware authors. You did notice that it isn't on the Unisys web site, didn't you? They flushed the original page down the Orwellian memory hole.
Unfortunately, the word of most corporations is worthless if it is not in a legally binding contract.
The LPF and their website is pretty much dead.
Use JPEG. Netscape 4 for Linux does support PNG, by the way -- see http://www.estinc.com for an example. The little menu images on the left side of the screen are little PNG files.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I sent a mail to unisys to thank them for their effort to stimulate the non-american computer industry:
Hi Guys,
Thank you for your idiotic behaviour regarding the lzw patents. With a bit of luck, your abuse (and that of many other companies) of the american patent system will kill off the american computer industry, leaving other countries to take over.
Thanks for helping us!
Tobias Nijweide
Have you really read my posting? I doubt it... So I'll try again: With PNGs you can add some alpha values to the fringe of your image, then save it and after decompressing it will nicely blend into the background. With GIFs you save your image with a "hard" fringe and there is no reason that prevents the displaying software from blending the fringe into the background after decoding. Of course there are AFAIK no browsers that antialias transparent GIFs on display but so there are none that handle alpha PNGs correctly.
Either have something to contribute, or leave.
--Dan
We use GD/Perl. The output needs to be readable by anyone, including WebTV users.
1. Does the new GD (which produces PNG) have a Perl interface yet?
2. Does WebTV support PNG? (Probably not..)
Is there any way around this? It is a commercial environment, not that that matters.
MNGs will be exponentially longer? Here are some
real-world results with a bunch of recent
banners found on the net, converted to MNG
with ImageMagick. The MNGs
are on average slightly smaller than the GIFs:
_GIF_ _MNG_ File
bytes bytes
13106 11766 Solid/32bitcom
9855 8293 Solid/amazon-auction
6140 6369 Solid/breakup
12314 12161 Solid/buzzabout
8160 9902 Solid/c-net
8458 8411 Solid/casino
8308 9101 Solid/catch-the-monkey
7644 7272 Solid/ccfraud
8453 8802 Solid/datek-fish
6195 6127 Solid/delphi-forums
12293 10964 Solid/dont-click-here
10960 15009 Solid/fatbraintext
15303 14769 Solid/find-the-ball
9621 8017 Solid/friends-homesite
9880 8993 Solid/gigabuys
11067 9834 Solid/house-net
13743 13622 Solid/how-low-blue
12217 10858 Solid/how-low-orange
9132 9050 Solid/ie_animated
8339 8324 Solid/insweb
12748 12474 Solid/its4you
13527 11067 Solid/million-cars
15856 14817 Solid/msinternet
9188 7593 Solid/necx-pcstore
6578 7029 Solid/ns-want-a-date
7997 7668 Solid/ruin-your-day
12385 11667 Solid/sgi-linux.gif
4885 4526 Solid/smart-browsing
5720 6060 Solid/surplus-auction
7190 6772 Solid/yahoochat
7966 8452 Transparent/any-point
10213 9000 Transparent/brand-roses
10494 9756 Transparent/brands60pct
10590 10747 Transparent/codewarrior-tools
12107 10619 Transparent/discovery-health
11002 11007 Transparent/fast-easy-free
10256 8867 Transparent/fathers-found-468
7933 7547 Transparent/free-shipping
9563 9286 Transparent/freeworld
11307 11175 Transparent/iSyndicate
11957 12670 Transparent/mailcom
9526 9410 Transparent/moneybag
11069 13438 Transparent/realguide
11941 11988 Transparent/roll-with-pros
6750 6341 Transparent/webidentity
9936 8751 Transparent/zdnetdl
459872 446371 total
Since release 1.3, Java supports PNG format, which makes PNG just as easy to use as any GIF or JPG file.
Neither the site references, or the one on the site referenced give any evidence that Unisys are doing anything.
I don't think that a patent on an algorhythm can be used to complain about a file, even if the file happens to be in the output of that alogryhtm.
This is completely ridiculous. I've been using GIF format for more than four years - why should I change now just because Unisys decides to be greedy? I can tell you one thing, if they get away with this I'm going to devote a good portion of my life to helping destroy them.
-Ted
---------------------------------
Owner/CEO, Websitters.com
http://www.websitters.com
---------------------------------
Owner/CEO, Websitters.com
http://www.websitters.com
-----
And this is exactly the same thing that I originally meant - we don't use it -- browsers (and graphics apps for that matter) don't bother to have proper support - old story :-(
;-) projects) would be now if it hasn't got such a developer and user (it's important also) base?
And may I insist that OS/Format comparison *is* proper in our case - what you think linux (and some other insignificant
And I think that if we don't see *any* switch from gif now then we'll not see it anytime at all.
Try doing a search. When the results come up, the little "ht://dig" man and the stars are .gifs.
my hairy ass Unisys. Are you insane or do you have one too many jerkoff corporate lawyers trying to justify their pathetic corporate existance?
Kiss my hairy ass.
Wow, you must be really bright. Your family should be feeding YOU so you can keep thinking full-time, man.
It's the patent owners who are restricting our freedoms. I can't share my own ideas, if they happen to be similar to some patent somewhere. The government via the legal system is essentially forcing me. No one forced Einstein and Newton to share their ideas, no one is forcing you to do so either.
The GIMP uses libungif to make uncompressed GIFs (without the LZW compression UNISYS claims a patent on). Not that you CAN'T compile it against libgif, but that's not the preferred/PC way to go.
Since I can afford neither their licensing fee nor the commercial software to create LZW-format according to their license, I have removed all gifs from my site.
Thought this one was over back when it was the "Compuserve-GIF" issue. Guess I was wrong; can't be bothered to beat this horse any more.
--The more you know, the less you know.
Have you ever heard of trade secrets? Trade secrets are the equivalent of proprietary formats. They don't allow your competitors to make use of your innovative new ideas. Patents are open. Anyone can use a patented method. Patents are the nineteenth century equivalent of open source.
Admittedly, the area of sofware patents is somewhat murky waters, but in general patents are a GOOD THING. Without patents there would be no incentive for inventors and innovators to publish their work, and a strong incentive not to publish (since they would have a monopoly, until someone could reverse engineer their product).
Perhaps the biggest difference is that you can find GIF code almost everywhere on the net, but the libpng code is rare, large, and unwieldy.
To get more PNG support in software, we need to get better PNG libraries and sample code.
Matt Slot / Bitwise Operator / Ambrosia Software, Inc.
This baffles me - why doesn't PNG support animation? It was supposed to replace GIFs after all. PNGs are useless to most websites for this reason. Also, is PNG _natively_ supported in Netscape and MS browsers?
What does his political beliefs have to do with his view on this? If you check out his personal information, you'll see he explains his political beliefs as well. You don't have to be a "Marxist" to not like the idea of intellectual property.
According to my logs, 95% of all visitors to my web pages have Netscape 4.0, MSIE 4.0, or later. All these browsers support PNG. The time to dump GIF is now.
- Block any IP from their network from port 80 on any web servers we might run
- Use scripts to re-direct them from our site if we can't block them altogether
- What else could we do to make their lives miserable?
It seems to me that there's a lot of us, and we can at least tick them off if we choose.Can you imagine if even 10% of web sites blocked access from their networks? Maybe then they'd play nice. I'm probably dreaming...
Just when you think a company cannot possibly prove itself to be more out of touch. Their PR firm must be going _ape_. "They said WHAT! Damage control!"
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." --Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
Nothing in PostScript or PDF requires you to compress your images (or other data) at all. Learn a little bit about these technologies before getting all freaked out. The documentation is all on Adobe's "partners" web site.
wipe you glasses and read the article with links again.
Xah
xah@best.com
http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html
Okay how about this. Write a program that takes an input image and then generates all possible output files until it comes across one that, when run through a GIF decoder, looks just like your input file. Certainly that doesn't violate Unisys' patents! How can they possibly require anyone to pay for a file generated in that manner?
What do you expect from a company which has on its home page(http://www.unisys.com/):
"Enterprise NT Rising
From desktop to data
center,Windows NT is taking over
the enterprise."
I was rather disappointed in ESR for spreading this crap.
You can have JPEG-compressed images in PDF documents already. As for "PNG compression", there's no such thing. If you're talking about Flate, PDF 1.3 supports that too.
Am I the only one that finds it humorous that
the PNG web page uses GIFs?
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
If you use any of the types of images specified above on your Web site that you received from an unlicensed software developer or service, you should have a license from Unisys
Please read it again. It means that if you use an image I created for you, and I didn't pay unisys their $5000 tribute, YOU must pay it, even if I used a graphics editor from someone who DID pay the tribute.
Note that if I am your employee, one of us must pay the tribute. (and it wouldn't be ME!)
Go ahead and switch BACK to PNG! The more people that use them, the more likely that MS will incorporate full PNG support.
Perhaps it is time to come out with GIFv2. This would be identical with GIFv1, except that the compression step would be replaced with an unpatented algorithm. zlib comes to mind. Such a simple, nobrainer transformation would give web site developers a GIF indistinguishable in functionality from the old, and at the same time give the maintainers of GIF tools an ultra-easy enhancement they could do to improve the salability of their work.
GIF is an old format that could use replacing, but JPEG is certainly not the thing to supercede it. JPEG is good for photographs, but that's about it. If your image has even a small amount of flat color, JPEG will give you huge, ugly artifacts. GIFs are lossless and much, much smaller in applications such as this. PNG will be a viable replacement when browser support is better, but for now GIF is the best thing we have.
I guess we could blow away patents, intellectual property, etc. Everyone could leech off our discoveries. We could then resort to mindless grunt work for a living. Excellent.
"I mean, patents make me sick. They inflate the price of everything while at the same time deny you many opportunities. Take the drug companies for example - one won't let the other use their patent - which means that certain cures and medicines are never found!!! Is this *really* benifitial for humanity?" What's wrong with inflating the price of everything, and why do I care about your opportunities? Why should I care what is beneficial to humanity? Why can't you spell "beneficial," by the way? "Sure, your feeding your family while denying those less fortunate to yourself access to these drugs. Third world countries are at the mercy of commercial drug companies because they won't share the information on how to manufacture." So I'm supposed to care more about "those less fortunate to yourself" than my family? Why's that? When did it become my job to take care of third world countries? "No man is an island." Wow, as long as you say so it must be true.
Maybe someone will make a good Java image processing program. Sun's making a whole lot of stuff focused on images and drawing (JAI, 2d API, GLF) so I don't think it should be too hard for someone who knows what he's doing. JAI supports codec of PNG (I'm pretty sure) as well as several other image formats. Plus, with the JDK 1.3 PNG is now an automatically supported image format (so you don't need JAI codec to load them). Java already uses alpha channels for its images, so it should display PNGs with alpha channels fine (I assume). Plus, I think that JDK 1.3 is the one that will be standardized, and that will be included in Netscape 5.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
Unisys IS an "anything for money" company. The CEO has set a goal of $11 billion in revenue by 2002 (I think).. Currently the company is running at 7 or 8 billion. They've got to get that money somewhere.
I don't write free software because I want to sell support. When I write free software, I DO IT BECAUSE I WANT TO WRITE FREE SOFTWARE. If someone wants to pay me for the support... cool! Otherwise, I make my money elsewhere (network admin work, custom software, research grants, etc).
The GNU folks, as best I can tell, think this way too. Their tools aren't written to sell support, but to be good. If you'd worked with many proprietary unices, you would have realized that the GNU tools _are_ good. Cryptic and unfriendly... not for those who know The Unix Way, and that's where the developers were coming from.
for once I'm with /.'ers.
People, remember GNU. Go to their site and read it.
We must unite and kick the unisys fuck out for good.
DO NOT CHICKEN OUT! for one reason or another. Get rid of gifs on your site. I have a large site with tons of gifs. It may be a problem for me.
Xah
xah@best.com
http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html
They'll be burning-in Intel's microprocessors.. Unisys recently acquired a company that does that sort of thing and got a contract with 'em. Press Release. They're also in bed with Microsoft trying to make Mainframe-like servers with loads of Intel processors and Windows NT. Could be interesting.
Less than 8-bit color is certainly possible with the PNG spec. PNG supports indexed color pixels, grayscale pixels and truecolor pixels. Indexed color pixels always refer to a color that is specified in 8 bits per sample, but the indexes themselves can be as few in number as 2 or up to 256, just the same range as GIF's color indexes.
What you may be referring to is the fact that PNG packs grayscale pixels and indexed color pixels as tightly as it can into bytes; therefore, if a pallette of only four colors is being used, and the indexes are stored in two bits each, each byte will represent four pixels, and compression will only occur if sequences of pixels happen to repeat exactly along those byte boundaries.
However, this overlooks a possibility suggested by the PNG spec itself: expanding the indexes to 8-bit representation, so that the full benefits of compression (aided by PNG's filtering capability) can be reaped. Since "deflate" compression implements Huffman coding, the 8-bit size of each index will get brought back down to almost the same size, averaging not much more than the log of the number of indexes.
And PNG has the "tRNS" chunk, which *also* allows one color to be transparent. As for browser support: well, that's not a technical issue, is it? It's a problem, yes, and probably the biggest argument against PNG. But it's not a technical drawback of the PNG format, anymore than Unisys's fees are a technical drawback of GIF.
Come, now. It's not like having a patent gives you the freedom to choose not to share your ideas.
You can always not distribute your work. Nobody'll use it, and that sucks.
Or maybe you can licence it out, if you're feeling greedy, and make those you licence it to sign thick NDAs with heavy penalties.
The problem is when NOBODY ELSE CAN INDEPENDANTLY CREATE YOUR WORK. That has nothing to do with your own free choice whether or not to share. It has everything to do with the restrictions that are being unfairly placed on others.
Apple's QuickTime 4.0 allows vector graphics and animations and such. It's not an open standard yet, but once it is morphed into MPEG-4, it will be. I've already seen some sites that use QT for graphics, and it's not that shabby.
I am going to patent the IF THEN satement. If your program uses them (or an equal statement in any language) you will have to pay me $5000. Course if you just want to use the IF and not the THEN I will let you use it for $2500.
If it's true that it's the compressing and decompressing that is patented, then isn't it only the browser makers that need a licence? It's the browser that does the decompressing.
> You are wrong about Unisys not "inventing > anything since long before the web." My > own group is in the process of getting a > patent. It involves off loading I/O (TCP/IP, > Raid) processing from a host system on to > an intelligent adapter. Gee, you all are going to be the first to do this? (giggle) RAID processing in an intelligent adapter! Imagine it! And UNISYS will hold all the rights to it! (giggle) Heaven forbid they get into a market that is just evolving, like storage area networks. But if they just patent something that is much older and simple, they won't need to get into that market.
Go to all of the government websites.. offshore websites.. private websites...
the courts would be FILLED... I don't believe ONE thing will come of it.
If you have the word "gift" on a page doesn't it get changed to "pngt"?
Netscape sucked in 1996 for not doing png and it sucks ass now for taking 50years to upgrade and for using 50megs of ram and crashing 50 times a day. at least IE4/5 suppors PNG native.... so lets do it, dump gif
Also, I think that the JAI API supports some form of codec for png, as well as several other formats (BMP, TIFF, etc.). I'm not sure about the JAI though, I don't have the documentation and it's hard to tell from unzipping the class files and looking at the directories and class names :). Anyone know more?
It Pissed me off that decnt, good or sometimes even great Techonigies get killed/stunned because of greedy ass companies trying to squezze an extra cent out of their product.
Sure companies have to make money, that is life.
See it from my point of view for a second, I enjoy computers, not for the money involved (like I make any, anyways) but for the almost spritytually benfeit and joy I get from them.
Companies do have to make money, that is a fact of life, but they don't have to be such assholes about it. You can do what is right, or do what is "the right thing" the first will make you more money, but does Bill Gates or any of these other b/millions NEED that much fucking money anyways.
It sickens me, I spent alot of time working (playing) with computers, not because of the money involved with the computer industy, but because I enjoy it. Because I know others like it, for the "ZEN" like state for configuring a highly secure system, or writing a tight peice of code.
When you sit at your computer after your work day, do you sit at it because it is your job, or because you truely enjoy computers?
Companies suck when it comes to the hobbies. Companies suck when it comes to the common people. Companies suck when it comes to everyone but them. Companies are defined as people that are in it for the fincail benifits instead of the euphoia they get from it.
Making a living is overrated.
Moneywise, I presently make squat -- I live in a small apartment, and more than a few of my clients have paid me in equipment rather than cash. My development computer is, while fairly current, far from new; My second machine, a early PowerMac, is entirely outdated (and on loan to a friend); My third system (a P5/133) is also being used by someone else.
When not working to pay for room and board (and my DSL connection), I work on free software. I'm presently gearing up for a bit of PalmPilot development, which promises to be interesting.
Know what? I'm happy. If you want more than this out of life, you're asking too much.
I'm not about to turn down money by any means -- a friend's offered me a partnership in a networking business he'll be starting, and I'm more than glad to accept. If someone offered me a job doing data security (a hobby I enjoy), I'd consider it very seriously. But money's not that important. If I could have a big house, several fast computers and no time to spend on free software and with my (RL) friends, I'd be far less happy.
---
I'm not saying that I'm typical. Not by a long shot. But one reason to create things is that there's great joy in doing so. Why must a company spend millions on R&D? Most truly great ideas come from a single person; Perhaps many folks get paid for by a company to implement this single person's idea, but there's no reason it can't be done a different way.
Don't make the assumption that things only get done when there's money in there for it. When I'm working for myself, I can spend the time to do it right; I'm happiest when I have a clean design and code which I find as beautiful implementing that which I want.
What a boring world, when people only work for money! I really wouldn't want to live there.
(Full disclosure: I'm a university student at CSU, Chico. That doesn't mean I expect to go out and make tons of money when I graduate, though. Or that I even want to. If I can continue to pay my living expenses and put even more time towards my own projects after school's out of the way... so much the better! But then again, I'm a little weird).
All admit I'm a little short on sleep at the moment, but if I read the Unisys web page correctly you need the license IF you're using GIF's created with software that isn't licensed. It sounds to me like they're targeting users of software from programmers that ignore their patent.
So my question is, if my site is created totally with Adobe products (Photoshop and Pagemill) am I effected by this?
In any case this does help show how stupid software patents are!
USA 800-328-0440
Canada 800-387-6181
Canadian French 800-361-8097
From http://www.uscsc.unisys.com/contact.htm
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
RANT DISCLAMER=STANARD DILUATED=ON
It Pissed me off that decnt, good or sometimes even great Techonigies get killed/stunned because of greedy ass companies trying to squezze an extra cent out of their product.
Sure companies have to make money, that is life.
See it from my point of view for a second, I enjoy computers, not for the money involved (like I make any, anyways) but for the almost spritytually benfeit and joy I get from them.
Companies do have to make money, that is a fact of life, but they don't have to be such assholes about it. You can do what is right, or do what is "the right thing" the first will make you more money, but does Bill Gates or any of these other b/millions NEED that much fucking money anyways.
It sickens me, I spent alot of time working (playing) with computers, not because of the money involved with the computer industy, but because I enjoy it. Because I know others like it, for the "ZEN" like state for configuring a highly secure system, or writing a tight peice of code.
When you sit at your computer after your work day, do you sit at it because it is your job, or because you truely enjoy computers?
Companies suck when it comes to the hobbies. Companies suck when it comes to the common people. Companies suck when it comes to everyone but them. Companies are defined as people that are in it for the fincail benifits instead of the euphoia they get from it.
/RANT>
FREE_TO_FLAME=ON
Wanted right away: A Netscape plug-in that replaces all gifs with something
more suitable (mockery of Unisys seems appropriate) and lets the web site
owner know that his gifs have been refused.
PNG is viewable in Netscape 4.61 without plugger3.0 enabled for x-png (preferences/browser/applications) i had to delete the plugger 3.0 entry because it crashed the browser... but i think few people use plugger anyway --- humanisme http://www.chez.com/happ/
Amazing. I remember years ago when Unisys made their GIF announcement. Poorly worded, full of confusing points. The simple fact is that they were unable to communicate with the world in a manner that was straightforward.
Once again, Unisys has shown that they are unable to successfully communicate ideas to the world. It almost seems that maybe they make their press releases intentionally confusing in order to stir up the greatest amount of fear and uncertainty.
Does Unisys actually make anything important these days?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But I've not seen Netscape or IE handle them correctly on any other system. Maybe it's time to push for that functionality from MS and Netscape.
I still don't think anyone's explicitly answered his question. Why should he bother to make anything, if it is only going to get copied, and no one will want to pay for it? Why should a company spend millions of dollars in R&D when they are going to end up giving it away? Sure, getting stuff free is nice, but how exactly do you make a living off of it if no one pays you anything?
Time to firewall all unysis ips, if everyone does this, then unysis wont see if you are using so called 'illegal' gifs. FUckem
I saw one the other day where a click on its blue background would generate waves -I think it was Sega.
If Java banners catch on, marketing will take over and it'll get ugly (right now, they're kind of a showcase of Java itself).
I don't want 200K applets that sing to me and flash Wired neon palettes until I click on them.
I only read a few of the first posts before I decided to post this message. After a few "its old, crappy, and only supports 256 colors" posts, and "just use a JPEG", I should chime in.
I do graphic design full-time for an ISP, and also contract work out through a marketing company. Here is what I have learned about web graphics in the past few years of web releated work:
1.) JPEG's are only good for photo's or photo realistic work. When saving things such as maps, even with the least amount of compression, the lines still "smear" because of the compression. I always do all of my links and mouseovers with GIF's because the keep the clarity of the image.
2.) GIF's are essentially vector based. For instance, I primarily develop my sites for fixed width because of their layout complexity. When doing so, I usually have to whip out a custom background of some sort. I _always_ make the backgrounds 2500 pixels wide.. so that they don't repeat on most anyone's screen resolution. Even at this size, my backgrounds usually average 2K because I save them as a GIF, and create them carefully. As a JPG.. these things would be huge!
3.) 99% of GIF animations are useless. However, there is the 1% which are nice.. custom done to add a sense of interactivity. Not the annoying clip art stuff.
4.) PNG format? Poor/little support yet. Nuff said.
After pushing pixels for 6 years, GIF's have became a very valuable tool for me. I am not afraid to move on to something else.. but it would certainly be nice if PNG's had the support that GIF's do...
"Our fair share of any market we choose to enter is 100%"
- Steve Ballmer, VP of Microsoft
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=UIS&d=t
up n up n up it goes...
44$ today.
market capitlization = $12.6 BILLION $
Last Trade
Aug 27 44 5/8
Change
-1/16 (-0.14%)
Prev Cls
44 11/16
Volume
807,600
Div Date
Aug 1990
Small: [ 1d | 5d | 1y | none ]
Big: [ 1d | 5d | 3m | 1y | 2y | 5y | max ]
Day's Range
44 3/8 - 45 1/4
Bid
N/A
Ask
N/A
Open
45
Avg Vol
1,342,500
Ex-Div
Jun 1990
52-week Range
17 5/8 - 46 3/16
Earn/Shr
1.38
P/E
32.34
Mkt Cap
12.628B
Div/Shr
N/A
Yield
N/A
That is not what he is saying. He is saying, "I have developed a great format for storing music. If you want to use it, you can pay me for my hard work." He is not saying, "What? You invented a different format for compressing music? I'm suing!" he is just saying that if you want to use HIS format, you have to pay HIM. If you want to use your format, go ahead. No one has answered how someone can really open something and still make money. He could open his format and make programs to use it, but once it is open, it is only a matter of time before a bunch of other people make rival software that does the same thing as his. They can even make it cheaper than his, or free. Now how is he supposed to make money on his idea. Why would anyone buy something when they can get something for free that does the same thing? So he's destined to make no money.
Not quite. Zip's deflate algorithm is LZH (Lempel-Ziv-Huffman). They're quite different. LZW dynamically builds a string table, while LZH explicitly includes the huffman tree and uses a sliding window (LZ).
Did the pickup come with a gun rack?
> We've only been able to observe the ozone layer
> for about 50 years. what kind of idiot
> 'scientists' jumped to the conclusion we were
> causing the ozone fluctuations? It's likely been
> going on for 1000s of years!
Ah, you called our bluff. You see, all of us scientists are "idiots" professionally and are not to be trusted in matters having to do with so-called scientific issues. We do however manage to play a very sophisticated political game. All alleged science research since Newton has been a big hoax, syphoning off many billions of dollars in R&D money for some nefarious purpose.
What purpose, you ask? I leave that for you to uncover. I'm sure your rapier acumen (and I must commend you on your very illuminating and scientific comparison of ACs in pickup trucks and SUVs) will undoubtedly lead you to the truth.
Just don't try to stop us--we know where you live.
Emperically testing:
Netscape 4.61, on a Windows 98 box, ploinks up the "Do you want to buy Quicktime now or keep on being pestered each day until the end of time" box, and displays a test PNG in the center of the window.
MS Internet Explorer just puts up in the center of the screen. Treats a PNG rather differently than a GIF or JPG file, anyway.
However! Netscape 4.51 on a Red Hat 6.0 Linux box displays the PNG image exactly as it does an identical image compressed into a GIF.
If websites were forced to switch to this format that is evidently only supported by a major web browser on that OS (by my quick check), I applaud the positive effect for Linux. But is the world ready to have every websurfer a sysadmin?
(1) Size: They were smaller for tiny images with few colors (bullets, tiny 16 color icons, etc.)
(2) Lossless: This IS an issue for tiny images where a few messed up pixels ruins a nice smooth image.
(3) Transparency: One color could be decreed transparent to let the background through. JPEG cannot do this.
(4) Animations. Well, when not abused, I s'ppose it's ok. Thank god browsers don't try to support animated gif tiled backgrounds (yikes!) That's worse than who pages enclosed in BLINK tags.
Oh one more (5) Supported: I haven't seen all that many programs that grok PNG. And certanly will not put them on my web page until all the major web browsers support it. (Old versions of IE and Netscape still in use, according to my httpd logs, did not).
I hope there will be a solution soon.
I just checked....all the cartoons on UserFriendly are GIFs.
Sig:
After reviewing this site:
http://corp2.unisys.com/LeadStor y/lzw-license.html
It looks like this thing is for real, but there's a bit too much confusion. Essentially, it looks like a web site operator would need to get one of these licenses if they either write their own gif-making software or if the people/products that they use to get GIF's make the images without giving Unisys a piece of the cake. So, if you use Photoshop, you're fine. However, I'm not sure what the implications would be for something like the GIMP. Since I'm not sure if the creators of the GIMP paid Unisys their "fair share," I think it would be on me to pay the fee. Damn.
My best advice is for everyone (and I do mean everyone) to contact the Unisys Licensing Department at 215-986-5693 (or fax at 215-986-3090) to ensure that you're safe. If they expect me to pay anything, I'll be sure to keep whoever answers the phone talking for a couple hours. I'm sure they'll have enough people to handle a phone slashdotting. Or maybe not. We'll see.
Unfortunately, Opera doesn't yet support PNG. Until it does, I'll be using JPGs and GIFs on my pages. When it does, I'll switch over. I'm not going to use crappy Netscape just so I can see some PNGs.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I scanned Unisys's page, and it appears they are claiming their licensing fees from everyone who uses any LZW-using formats. That includes PDF and PostScript files with compressed bitmaps.
I could care less if GIF bites the dust, but I'm more than a little perturbed about PDF. Does the PDF format define any alternate compression schemes?
Without a doubt, the Wright brothers rightly deserve their place in history of aviation. But, had they won their suit against Glenn Hammond Curtiss and other aviators, we probably wouldn't have the diversity nor innovations that has propelled the development of aerospace technology as we know it today.
The suit hinged on their patent for mechanically warping the wing which allowed the pilot to control the longitudinal axis in flight. In contrast, Curtiss, believing that wing-warping was inefficient and inevitably would be mechanically unpractical for the larger airplanes to come, had designed the aileron which achieved the same effect by hinged sections that moved up or down.
To block Curtiss and other competitors, the brothers attempted to extend the patent's coverage, by demanding royalties even though competitors had employed other mechanical means such as ailerons. Their reasoning was that the patent covered the principle of altering a wing's profile to effect a roll. Therefore anyone, regardless of the method of changing the wing's profile, was in effect infringing on their patent. This more than anything else put a damper on development in the US for the 8 years that it took for the courts to deny that broad claim. Meanwhile, development continued unabated in other countries, although the Wright brothers tried to fight that as well.
As the courts saw it, the Wright brothers' patent was about twisting the wing, resulting in a desired effect of natural law, and not about causation. Can you imagine the mechanical and technological requirements necessary to bank a 747 by twisting it's wings? Not impossible, but unlikely.
Now jump forward about 9 decades and once again, we see Unysis,Apple among other notables suing over the use of some kind of "exclusive" concept. Ultimately, it is the customer who decides the value of a product and by stirring up the debate, it's more than likely to fly back in Unysis' face.
Didn't Apple almost go out of business suing clone makers? Normally, a patent has a period of exclusivity (i.e. 17 years for a mechanical design, so that the inventor can recoup his invstments. In Internet time, however, GIFs have been around a long,long, long time, and as noted by fellow Slashdot nerds, it's time to move along--I want to see & use 3D animation and vector formats.
**To know a thing you have to trust what you know, and all that you know, and as far as you know in whatever direction y
To start off, I have to say this: I hate GIFs. They're huge, they're ugly, they can be (ugh) animated, and they only have on possible level of transparency. PNG is, over, a much better format.
Now, the first problem here is that the current browsers don't really support PNG when first installed. Not only that, but most people who use only the web are using Netscape 2 or 3, because they don't feel the need to upgrade, or they have know idea how.
At his moment, I'm currently working for a large-ish webdesign company, and as any credible web designer knows, one of the first rules of designing a page is: make sure the most amount of people can see your page properly or they won't think much of the content.
Now everyday for the last month I've been working on a huge project for a very large local company. In that massive site I'd say at least 75% of the graphics are GIFs (because of the need for transparency). To replace all these graphics would cost the client a very large sum, and keep them waiting for the final product for a very long time, so it would be more cost effective for the customer to pay 5000 USD then to have us redo all the pages with JPGs. This is how Unisys is going to end up making money, and they're going to keep making money until the law is fixed, not until the new browsers come out with better PNG support, because web pages have to be viewed by everyone.
StylishPants.Org - Home of everything that's interesting, and nothing that's not.
some sites that use "unlicensed" freeware (such as the old libgd) to generate GIF's on the fly, and are stupid enough to mention this, will probably get dinged. At $5000 a website, it's worth Unisys' while to trawl the web for violators. Or at least, popular websites, cause that's where the money is.
Come on folks ... Macromedia Flash is both vector and bitmap based, the files are small and the animations kick seriouse ass compared to gif's !!
And there is no LZW compression anywhere in the program that I know of! Flash 3.0 works with Netscape and as far as I know Internet Explorer.
So I agree lets Burn all Gif's
You've been listening to too much Rush Limbaugh. Volcanic eruptions put out chlorine, not CFCs. CFCs do not occur naturally.
The Unisys patent is only on the process of compressing or decompressing via LZW. Images aren't covered. The reason they are going after websites, are to "protect" the website against liability if they use unlicensed products to create their GIFs.
Their website license is outlined here: Stupid Unisys page
There's several solutions:
No, PNG doesn't change the data at all. If it did, it is lossless.
makes you wonder if the manufacturers of our printers can come after us for every page we have printed out on them.
Recurring theme: "I ain't gonna use png's right now 'cos they are less supported than gif's.."
.. and this one from the guys that will (mostly) will flame you crispy for the like: "I ain't gonna use linux for a server 'cos winnt is more supported blah-blah-blah"
Just have courage -- just do it... These Unisys bastards will again and again try to racket some fearful lamers - believe me, they won't give it up.
Personally I gonna try to convert my company's site to png this monday and see what'll happen...
BTW: Hear these boys at opera & netscape: you'd better give more attention to this png'ie thing also. Transparency !!
GIF animation is crude, /very/ ugly, and extremely obnoxoius. They aren't nessicary on any web page, and when on most they actually detract from the overall design. If you want animation that doesn't suck, and that has even a chance at impressing people, use Flash.
StylishPants.Org - Home of everything that's interesting, and nothing that's not.
It is not an open standard, people can't write there own implementations of it, and you probly need a licence to make flash thingies.
And it ain't no good if it need some darn plug-in to work with the browser.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
They're gonna make an example of you're butt. By the time they're done with you, you'll wish you had converted to PNG. The long arm of UNYSIS is reaching out to grab your neck! Convert!! Convert I say!! Mosaic users be dammed! Better their worhtless hide for not upgrading than yours for resisting the UNYSIS_MAN
If Unisys was suing you, it would be in civil court, not criminal court. Civil court's standard of proof is "preponderance of evidence", not "shadow of a doubt". All Unisys would need to do is call one or two first-year comp. sci students and have them explain what "2^n" means. Then they pose the following question:
Is it more likely that:
Guess which of these alternatives is more likely, given the preponderance of evidence. (Remember that the jury already knows what "2^n" means, and that in this case n=41176. Be sure to thank your lucky stars the Unisys lawyers didn't bother to ask what you did with all the files of length 1..5146, too; you're already so deep in shit that it might suffocate you.) And don't bother whining about "innocent until proven guilty", since you're not in criminal court.
If you don't have source code for the system that generated all of those 5147-byte files, proof that you have the computational power to run this system in a reasonable amount of time, and logs showing exactly how this program ran, better bring your checkbook. You'll be signing over quite a few dollars to Unisys before the end of the day.
I have news for you: They can. The plaintiff in a civil suit is entitled to the defendant's evidence, or the plaintiff wins. The question isn't even close.
In fact, most law-school graduates, and a fair majority of judges, are bright enough to recognize that procuring a violation of your duties under the patent law is the same as violating them yourself. The tricks that work to avoid exporting crypto software don't work here.
"A good lawyer who does pro bono work." Imagine the scene: You go into a law office, and explain you want them to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries, rents, and expenses, in order to defend a lawsuit you deliberately incurred because you assumed they'd bail you out for free. Instead of doing less-expensive work in defense of the rights of a genuinely poor person. And your chances of success are...?
Also, the ugly fact of American law is that it is in the hands of lawyers, judges, and legislators who sincerely believe there is no such thing as a frivolous lawsuit. To them, filing suit is a sacrament of a free people, like voting or going to high school. The system does not even admit that being sued costs defendants anything, lest plaintiffs and their lawyers be held accountable for abuses. A filing would have to be the obvious product of paranoid schizophrenia before your lawyer would expect to get sanctions for it. Effectively, there is no ethical limit on filing a lawsuit in America.
This does suggest that as Open Source assets become rich enough to invite legal predation (see the SW patent proliferation topic of 8/28), the community ought to set aside part of its IPO gold rush to defend itself.
Check Unisys' site again. They mention PDF's and TIFF's. Ummmm, should I be scared yet?
Of course it would be very slow... but how could they prove you didn't create your GIF files that way?
I'm quite willing to take away your freedom to kill me in cold blood. I'm also willing to take away your freedom to tell me what I am allowed to do with knowledge in my own head.
Why is it that most people agree that monopolies are bad, but if someone claims to be the first one to do something, all of a sudden they have a "natural right" to a monopoly?
Bah. He owned you...
it's not the burn all GIFs day that we need to come with, it's rather the Burn all Lawyers days just like with witches or Jeanne d'Arc ;-))) more seriously, it seems that we're really seing the beggining of a new era where creativity and free developement doesn't mean anything ! but are we really ready to fight against "industry bullies and parasites" as described in the Linux Journal's article : The Coming Software Patent Crisis: Can Linux Survive? (very nice reading)
down since this SlashDot article was posted? I wonder if thousands of users are all trying to simulatiously swap their GIFs for JPGs & PNGs.
BTW: I converted all my GIFs to PNGs and mostly the transparency fell over. I can work 'round it, and infact many of the images have moved to JPG. Gives me a challenge for the week.
It is about time the web gave up on GIFs and properly supported PNG. Alpha channels would make the web rock, but lets not stop there - I've requested that YahooGeoCities support "rar", a better-than-zip archive format. Request your favourite format too.
Compress the Web!
Kris.
Win a Rio (or join the SETI Club via same link)
Does Unisys actually do anything? I suppose a few years ago, they actually produced things, but are now pretty much a Beltway Bandit- a generic $500 hammer gov't contractor, distinguished only by the color of their paychecks and their ancient corporate history. Booring... they'll choke sooner or later. Good riddance. Gregm
"I hereby decalre that all websites I produce, have produce, or intend to produce are 'pay per view.' There will be a 5000 dollar charge to view, or machine-parse, these sites, except for non-commercial use. Viewing this site, parsing it, or any other action involving transfers of the data, or part thereof, contained on the site, for any action will be considered an agreement to this charge. " So viewing the site, or running a robot thru it to check for GIFs, to sue me for 5000 bucks... counts as commercial usage... Would it work? WR Stick that in a comment
Ug. That makes them indistinguishable from most other blood-sucking consultant shops. But, if you buy one of their boxes does that make any .gifs on it legal, or do you still have to pay their licensing fees on top of their "super-cool-Unisys" premium? :) Gregm
good idea. they're big enough they ought to have a huge block. anybody wanna offer up a complete listing (I'm travelling and each second online costs me).
And if the leading proponents of the idea that software should be free, unencumbered, and unpatented refuse to use free, unencumbered, and unpatented software because it isn't popular enough, why should anyone else give a damn about software freedom?
Somone's been reading Cryptonomicon ;)
I'm not an intellectual property attorney but it seems to me this is the ultimate unenforceable stance. I've been cranking out GIFs for years and I defy you to tell me what software created the file and which software merely modified the file, and to prove that you can do squat about it even if you can prove how I made the file.
And everyone had who said it was time for a new vector based graphic format was correct too. However, how many such formats have those of us who pay attention to such things seen come and go. At current we have Flash and Shockwave for vector based graphics WITH animation (the only reason i use GIFs)AND interactivity. But everybody's dragging their feet about making them the standard, so they won't be. And 5 years from now GIF will still be around.
I'll admit that at the poles, under the winter ozone hole, there do not seem to be many frogs on the ice.
But since it's under the GPL, his neighbor will start selling that too. His children are still hungry.
While I am all for open source software, I must say that we should respect Unisys' intellectual (?) property.
.jpg, and to then email all unused .gif files back to Unisys. I'm sure they'll appreciate the gesture.
.gifs from across the web get returned...
Perhaps the only thing to do is to convert all our web graphics to
Heck, maybe a robot should be used to make sure that ALL unlicensed
...just foo it...
Patents are to encourage publication, yes, but in the modern age, the patent period is far too long. It should be no more than five years from the patent application (not grant) date. How long have we all been waiting for the RSA patent to expire?
To make matters worse, the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) keeps issuing completely isane software patents. I think the PTO patent examiners are completely incompetent to rule on anything related to software, and the PTO should either hire competent examiners, or stop accepting software patent applications.
In addition, just because the content of a patent is public doesn't mean you can just use it! You must get a license from the patent holder, and he can charge you whatever he likes as a license fee. The comparion to Open Source is wrong.
As for "trade secret" - those are easily broken by reverse engineering. A "trade secret" is established by a contract between two parties, the holder of the secret, and someone to whom the holder discloses the secret under the condition that the secret not be further disclosed to anyone not already under contract not to disclose. When a trade secret is disclosed beyond the parties to the non-disclosure agreement, there are no criminal penalties if there was no crime committed to come into possession of the secret (i.e. you didn't break into a lab and steal it in order to publish it), there is only a "tort" (a civil cause of action) potentially against the publisher, if and only if the publisher was party to the non-disclosure agreement!
To put it another way, "trade secret" is easily broken with no recourse for the holder of the secret if they didn't protect it well enough. Exactly like National Security Top Secret stuff: it does no good to sue China after they've stolen your plans for the W88 nuclear warhead...
I wonder how many other assholes will pop up, seeing this as a cue to cash in on their exploitation of the patent system.
Why the hell is this marked offtopic?
Patents -> Making money off Patents -> Potential Solution
Someone needs to take a ride in the ClueMobile.
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
It is a bogus patent to begin with. But there should only be about 5 years or so left on it. Does anyone know when it is due to expire? The money grubbing US Congress which is bought and sold like street whores could always extend it. They have twice violated the law by retroactively extending copyrights (how would you like to sign a contract only to have congress change the rules retroactive?). At the moment, high paid lobbyists are trying to have the patent on the allergy medicine Clariton extended. The patent is due to expire in 2002 and it will cause the price of Clariton to drop from $90/month to $15/month. But the greasy fat lobby is plying congress with dollars and whores so that they will extend the patent. Every congressman is a scurvy dog.
> But since it's under the GPL, his neighbor will
:/
:(
> start selling that too. His children are still
> hungry.
Then that's a choice the author will have to make. Will he make a free and open player, or a commercial one he/she can sell in a store or elsewhere? It all depends on what you want out of the program. Make money, or make it free.
Unfortunately, short of selling manuals and taking support calls for the free version, you can't have it completely both ways I guess.
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
> vi index.html
:1,$s/.gif/.png/g
>
or
:%s/.gif/.png/g
i thought I had no sig?
Like, you know, RMS. Ever taken a look at http://www.gnu.org? Sorta funny.
Every blasted picture has the same silly tag attached, "no gifs due to patent problems".
It links to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html, and talks about how they think GIFs suck and that they won't use them for various and sundry reasons, the gist of which essentially states that not doing so is both a defensive measure and a protest of the patent.
"RMS is an alarmist." "RMS is a fanatic." Looks like he hit it square on the head, folkses -- Unisys has officially Cracked Down on the use of their patent.
Not that I can figure out how this is going to profit Unisys one single dime. Is someone spiking the water?
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
Hey, first RMS is lambasted for being too principled, or even alarmist, en then for being practical?
I guess he can't do no good at all for some people.
JPEG's a great format too, for some purposes. PNG is probably better for the kind of images on the FSF website.
The reasons they didn't use PNG as their primary format had nothing to do with any inherent badness of PNG, it's just a practical decision. JPEG's just as unencumbered as PNG.
So just stop it.
EJB
...everything has to be quantifiable. It all has to fit in a neat package of theories and laws. Nature has to do what we have dictated it to do in our books and equations. Those frogs are supposed to be there for us to look at them. Look, here it is, written right here - it's law. Nature is wrong! :) If you can't polute them out of existance, slash and burn them out of existance, starve them out of existance, or theorize them out of existance just lie about it and hope everyone thinks it must be the rest of the world with the problem because their pond is over-flowing with frogs... :) It's amazing out humans react when things happen that is beyond their scope of influence, control or knowledge. God forbid that the Earth survived for billions of years without us... Shux, we'll just polute, bomb, shoot, slash and burn, poison and overstress ourselves into extinction and be replaced by something else and life goes on and the Earth is happy...
The misuse of intellectual property and patents in the computer industry sickens me.
We have Apple and Microsoft patenting GUI's. We have intel patenting CPU's. We have Frauenhoff with their MP3's, and we have these guys patenting compression. It's more that these companies choose to exploit their patents by having an unfair advantage on competitors, while having full reign on the consumers that use their technology.
Well, all I can say is that I am thankful of open standards, because it gives me the choice to bypass the restraints that these patents cause. But then its never impossible to escape the intellectual property, as companies try to fork open standards into their own propietry model (does html and Java ring a bell?)
Patents and intellectual property are backward. They don't help discovery - they merely hold the other guy back. Information is such a powerful thing, and to put locks on information that is benefitial to humanity is really quite selfish and evil.
I'm glad that all the important scientific discoveries were made before we had patents and intellectual property. Imagine going to your calculus exam and getting charged to use binomial approximation to solve a problem. Imagine your faculty not being able to teach you Newton's laws because they couldn't afford the royalties.
This is why things like free software and open source will go down in history on a good note, whearas Microsoft will go down in history on a bad note. Would Newton be as respected had he tried to charge people for his science? I think not.
Actually, I can't live without alpha channels, or at least a transparency channel. I'm using primarily PNGs and JPEGs on my websites, EXCEPT when I need transparency. Then, I'm forced to use GIFs, because the transparent channel is rendered as black in Netscape.
I think alpha channels is a major feature of PNG and should be supported immediately.
1) It IS an open standard.
2) People CAN write and HAVE written their own implementations of it.
3) You do need a license, but it costs US$0.
At Macromedia's Flash section:
Flash Homepage
Free Flash Player source code
Open Flash file format FAQ
File format specification
To further Flash as a Web standard, Macromedia has undertaken many initiatives, including opening the Flash file format, releasing the Flash Player code for free licensing, and allowing redistribution of the Flash Player.
So there. It's not Open Source in and of itself, but it exposes the standard for Open Source to be created around it.
Someone replied to one of my comments before and directed me to this site.. I just wanted to say thank you to that person and share this url with anyone else who is interested in the downfall of Intellectual Property. Some of my friends have made (and continue to make) a lot of money off IP. Hell, my own father is a composer, but as much as I try I still don't fathom the justification of IP. Share your ideas.
How we know is more important than what we know.
This doesn't sound like my understanding of the patent. They have a claim on the compression/decompresion algorithm, not the output. A set of bytes is not patentable even if there is some special format to them, as far as I understand. The process of producing those bytes is, at least under US patent law. If they are trying to licence the output, they are probably overstepping their patent claim. In other words, it shouldn't be your problem if you obtained the GIFs from someone who claimed to be licenced to produce them for you, because you bought the sequence of bytes, not the use of the algorithm.
Of course, the small Web site operators may prefer to pay the GIF extortion tax rather than try to prove this point in court at much greater expense...
or (being that dot is wildcard)
:% s/\.gif/\.png/g
Its obvious that unisys sucks and is having money problems... they are tightly holding on to the only thing that they have, the only thing that will make them money.
What Unisys did is absolutely ridiculous, because if they really had cared, they would have done something about it ages ago. I hope that GIF will be abandoned after this incident, because it is outdated and almost useless. Its only advantage is animation, but I don't think anyone will be missing "CATCH THE MONKEY AND WIN $20!"
*-emufreak-*
www.kontek.net/pp
If you take a look at unisys's homepage, you'll notice that all the graphics they use are in "jpg" format. This is not really surprising, since many commercial companies use GPL or open source software to develop their commercial products, for which they then charge heavily....even though a lot of it has been produced with FREE products. Hypocrisy! I guess unisys does not want to charge itself the "petty" $5000 user fee.
Just noticed that those very attractive topic icons seem to be all GIFs. So Rob, is Andover gonna cough it up for the licesnse, will you convert them, or will you defy the MAN?
--
So will someebody explain to me why if I have GIF's all over my site, and I unkowingly use a program that is not a "licensed" gif maker, why I'm liable for something that the program creator may or may not have done??? Am I liable for someone elses defective product?? Is that fair? Isn't that over reaching?? Isn't there a law protecting consumers from such stuff??
This issue has been known for quite a while. These patents make it impossible to have free software to generate proper GIFs. See www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html for an explanation.
Slashdot forces you to stick something in the comment area, so I have to put this here. (*NT* means no text.
*-emufreak-*
www.kontek.net/pp
Let's see, according to current estimates (http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/1999/07/web m/) there are 5 million unique websites. Since most web servers automatically install gifs among their default image files, it's a safe bet to say that every single one of them has images that were created using your algorithm. 5M x $5,000 per site = $25 billion! I'm curious, how much of this have you already recovered through licensing fees? Do you really expect all the other webmasters out there to be sufficient suckers to just shell out $5,000 for a licensing policy you foisted on them and don't have a prayer of ever enforcing? I mean, what are you going to do, sue 5 million different parties? Laws only exist insofar as they can be enforced, and your claim in this case is unenforceable. Furthermore, because of the usurious rates you set, you can't even count on people paying out of gratitude or to support futher development efforts.
In the unlikely event that you do succeed in making enough of a stink to discourage continued use of the GIF format, PNG (distributed by non-insane individuals) is poised to take its place. If I were you, I'd find someone from the open source community still willing to talk to you and ask that person for advice on damage control. Of course, you won't, and will instead get burned and ridiculed, both of which you deserve for being greedy and out of touch with reality.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad you're doing this. Crass mistakes like yours will hasten the collapse of this country's antiquated system of dealing with intellectual property, and that is of course a good thing. Keep up the good work.
PS: I believe that a number of my web pages are in violation of your "easy" licensing terms. However, I believe the likelihood of being taken to court by you is so miniscule that it's not worth the expense of replacing all of my GIFs with PNGs, so I'll just remain out of compliance until I hear from your lawyers. While you're at it, why don't you also sue the entire University of Michigan (where I'm located), I'm sure there are a number of non-compliant official and unofficial sites here. Come and get us, we're waiting.
Show me a Unisys lawyer's letter, or something similar if you want to claim that.
Well, if history is any guide, Unisys will come out with a second announcement to partially clarify everything they said in the first. And maybe make a change or two in the process. (I'll give them credit for at least that much.)
It's not enough to boycott GIFs in favour of PNGs. The enemy are at their weakest-- now is the time to openly defy their claims as loudly as possible, forcing them to concede that they are being ludicrous. We should flood their mailboxes with reports on every web server we "suspect of not being licensed". Someone should come up with a web-banner saying 'this site defies UniSys and is proud of the fact', and we could all put it up on our sites.
Do you *really* think that Unisys will sue everyone that uses GIFs on their website? It wouldn't take many cases before it really hits their bottom line. Especially when they'll lose most of their cases.
Its kindof like Ford suing *me* because I own a GM car that uses unlicensed Ford technology.
If Unisys is going to do anything, it would be to collect royalties from programs that create and display GIFs. Thats a MUCH smaller set of parties and MUCH easier to prove. (yes, I know thats not what the article implied)
Besides, as I understand it, the LZW patent just covers the algorithm. Compuserve defined how the LZW compressed data was to be stored. Unisys didn't do that.
Another thing, the Unisys article said that LZW was patented just 10 years ago. I *strongly* suspect that someone will be able to show public domain - especially if they sue alot of people.
Tom
Secondly, however, if the original image is encumbered, running it through a purifier would not remove the encumbrance.
However, I seriously doubt that the pictures themselves are encumbered at all. Unisys claims this, but even they word it rather weakly. Programs that generate GIFs may violate the patent, but not the results of running these programs. And that means that the creators of GIFs can perhaps be sued, but not the distributors. Most probably, only authors of programs using the algorithm are liable, but there is little money to be had from them, and hence Unisys tries to milk fatter cows (or more of them...).
Regardless, I say lets switch to PNG. Open standards rule.
Stephan
If it wasn't crazy, I'd say that Unisys has just found a sure-fire method for driving down its stock price in a hurry. Makes you wonder what they're up to over there.
:)
They used to be known for systems and management, but lately they seem like an "anything for money" company.
Either way, their position seems pretty much unenforcible, right or wrong. I just hope they push it far enough to tear a gaping hole in the patent system as it stands.
-- lk t lv ll th vwls t f wrds. T svs lts f tm t wrt bt ts pn n th ss t rd nd mks m lk lk cmplt dpsht.
Here is the actual patent on the IBM service.
It has 181 claims (!) and is referenced by 125 other patents.
- GIFs allow you to choose the color depth, even below 256 colors. this is great if you have technical drawing like images with just a few colors, as it allow you to compress the image even further. This is very important for professional sites and saves quite a little time and bandwidth. <8-bit color is not possible with PNG. So the corresponding PNG files are quite a little bigger.
- GIFs allow one color to be transparent. I know, PNG also has an alpha channel, but alpha'd PNGs dont compress as well and browser support is lousy - at best.
- GIFs allow for easy animation. Not possible with PNG, and MNG is not quite there yet. I know, the animation feature is mostly abused these days, but there are counter examples.
So don't go around saying "GIF sux, PNG r00lz". You will only look stupid.Netscape 4.05 for Linux supports PNG, by the way (but slightly broken.)
JPEG has lossless mode too, bitch
When browsing MS Office documentation you will notice that (as far as I noticed) there is no way of storing a GIF file in any office product. All GIFs will be internally stored as JPG, BMP or, preferrably, PNG (sic!). This favor seems to be finally something RMS and MS share besides two letters of the alphabet ;-)
Except, I wouldn't expect RMS to force stupid companies to enforce their patents, btw...
I'm not sure that they have a product line worth worrying about. They were eclipsed by DEC years ago and have steadily slipped into oblivion since then. You hear about innovative products from IBM, Compaq, Sun, HP and a few others. Even the tattered remnants of DG and Wang have been in the news the last few months. But Unisys? Nah... Frankly, if I were a stockholder, I'd be asking the "management" of Unisys a lot of hard questions, like why they are wasting so many company resources on bullshit like this instead of doing something *profitable*, or at least something that reflects *positively* on the company. For that matter, it wouldn't be too hard to go out and buy a share or two of stock for precisely that reason (or to short it ! :-). Years ago, its competitors (who were soundly beating it into the ground) used to refer to its predecessor as UniCrap. Well, the current myopic management team has now earned the moniker UniShit. Spammers for the sex sites (whom I suspect use *lots* of "revealing" GIF's) should now have a field day sending their pornospam to UniShit's legal team so they can sue the sites. Another thought - what if the US DOD decided that because of the uncertainty of what software that creates GIF's can or can't be used, they should no longer accept RFP's or RFQ's from Unisys, much less place any orders with them?
I think it's time for us to team together and try to make Unisys go bankrupt. Why don't we file a class-action suit against them to prove financial damages caused by the GIF format? We can show that it's 256-color format is a useless and that they should have to pay all of us who have sites using it for our costs in converting our web sites to a proper format.
I am not a lawyer, but it would appear that IBM also has a patent on the same algorithm. Have a look at patent number 4814746 .
Try doing "View Images" and look at page 4 of 12. As far as i can tell, that flowchart diagram describes precisely the LZW compression algorithm that Unisys also claims its patent on.
I don't know what the implications of this are. Does it mean that one or both patents are invalid, or only that the Patent and Trademark Office is incompetent? (Oh, i guess we knew that anyway.)
-- ?!ng
Is there any software that will take a
compressed gif as input, and produced an
uncompressed gif as output?
How about software that will take a compressed
gif as input, and produce an RLE-gif as output?
Has anyone determined for certain if RLE gif's
are legal? The GD maintainer seems to be
concerned that they may not be.
"The Web, of course, was one of the main targets for PNG support since progressive display is so important to those browsing over a low-speed link"
But on their main page their logo is displayed as a gif and links to a jpeg, all those colorful buttons are gifs and other graphics tend to be gifs. Now, on the php site, they use php. Why then can't the png site get up the gumption to have at least a few or even one png image? They may have to now that Unisucks is pulling their usual crap, but I'm curious - given the explanation of "a few browsers still don't support png", there should at least be a few png files on their site... For crying out loud - that a few people turn off Java and Javascript isn't enough of an excuse for sites to not use Java and Javascript - what's so different about png?
Remember in the eighties (or was it early nineties) when they made the link between CFC's and the ozone layer and they spent millions of dollars on advertising compains to stop everyone using CFC's and move on to a different propellant? Well that new propellant was made by the people who owned the patent on CFC's and the patent on CFC's was due to run out exactly one year before the advertising compain started. No-one really talks about the ozone layer anymore.. but they don't use nearly as much CFC's as they do this new chemical. In 50 years time when the patent is due to run out on, Freeon is it?, will we see "Freeon causes ***" where *** is something that everyone on the planet can agree is a *bad* thing. I think I remember seeing a show on tv that explained how elementry the CFC=ozone layer killer chemistry was and how the trivialization was leading chemists to doubt the "hole in the ozone layer" studies.. so yer.. this isn't my own deluded paranoid fantasy.. this is someone else's paranoid fantasy who managed to get on tv back when this was topical.
How we know is more important than what we know.
So when is AOL going to patent and start charging for their stupid .art format? ha
Isn't this a bit out dated? I mean, c'mon the stuff on Unisys' pages is between four and five years old here. (near as I can tell from using their search engine anyway, it's all from '94/'95)
l
The stuff on LPF isn't much better as it points to, you guessed it, the original Unisys articls... yet they mysteriously give it a date of aug 99. Hrrm... As near as I can tell, the article posted at http://corp2.unisys.com/LeadStory/lzw-license.htm
was linked originally from a press release dating back to January of 1995. I think that we'd have heard by now if Unisys was REALLY going to do something about this or not...
And Burnallgifs.org doens't seem to link to anything other than the original, by now moldy press release/liscense information page and other articles that have actually linked to him.
The article from LPF that points to Barnstormer-Software.com is almost a year old. (And it's the most recent thing I've found that actually has some input from Unisys in it.)
So, even while it appears that Mr. Osborne has had a run in with Unisys over this issue, I haven't heard anything that Unisys has said about this isse less than 10 months old. Does ANYONE have ANYTHING new to add to this???
A case of the tale wagging the dog? Did someone find this old press release and suddently think the sky is falling?
This is from the Unisys definitions page.
;-)
(The following is reprinted from Unisis without permission
A Billboard Web site
1.is fully open to the general public without cost or other consideration
(that is, no restricted access or user cost of any kind or form)
2.does not display any third-party advertising
3.does not require any membership, access code, password or business
relationship with the user for access to any portion of the Web site
4.does not provide for the online ordering or purchase of goods or
services via the Web site
My question is.... What does #2 mean? If you display 3rd party ads then your site is not a "billboard" site and desn't have to worry about a liscence? Seems like they wouldn't want to have one banner ad nullify an entire site from their liscence but that's the way I read it.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
-pos
The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
They can have my site's one backwards-compatible, transparent, superfluous GIF when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. (Can I borrow $5000?)
-Lx?
The following is, sadly, Windows-only, however...
Xara (www.xara.com, makers of the superb CorelXara vector drawing package) have a browser plug-in for their .web format files.
See these pages for details...
Everyone seems to agree that Unisys bites. Bite back. Don't buy products that profit Unisys.
I'm not familiar with Unisys' product line. I'd like to be. Anyone able to help me out?
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
What are you people yelling about gif for? This mockery of the web will end. (The dumb company that is.) The web would fall apart without gif. 90% of all designs depend on those little clear squares. What the whould happen without them? Hello? W3 tries to make microsoft/netscape use simple standards. Where's CSS2? Where did the idea go of slowly getting rid of for style sheets? The people who make browsers don't care about new technologies. Why don't they add things in new releases? Did MSIE5 add anything really on the backend? I don't think anything useful. But not I have a "GO" button. I don't know how I got by with Enter. Stability and legacy stuff keeps it stagnate. The web is too big for everything to be incorporated asap. It could be done faster though. The web isn't evolving as fast as it could.
uninstall Apple's QuickTime. that will solve the problem.
Adobe's PDF format may be good, but I think an open format could end up being better, mabie one that uses JPG and PNG compression for images?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Well, if by some miracle, Unisys does manage to enforce this, what implications will that have for personal web page builders, like me? I recently checked my pages - I have over 7 MB of GIF images on my sites. When you are talking about 4-20K images, this translates to a ton of images to convert. So, what is to happen? Are the free web space providers just going to nuke any site that contains "unliscensed" GIFs? That would definately spark a massive cyber-war...and this one would be fought OUTSIDE the Quake III arenas...
Also, how is Unisys going to prosecute violators? There are hundreds of thousands of web pages that utilize GIFs. Not to mention that they will find it difficult to prosecute non-US based servers. I know about international trade laws and such, but if they honestly think that they are going to get more than 2 licenses from this move, then someone in charge is on crack.
Its laws like these that make criminals out of honest, law-abiding citizens.
Actually- Unisys probably just has everything in jpg because they hired some crappy design firm that thinks that jpg is smaller than gif for everything, so they should use it for everything. This is a common misconception among poorly educated web designers. I sincerely doubt they were trying to avoid their own idiotic and unenforcable fee.
15 years (a considerable amount of that time using GIFs) and still for the pure enjoyment of it, lucky thing it pays ;)
As far as I'm concerned, they have as much of a chance of enforcing this effectively as they have a chance of enforcing a patent on the process of breathing. How many thousands (or millions) of sites on the Web use the GIF format? Have they no idea how ridiculous it would be to sue every single admin/webmaster of every GIF-using site on the Internet, not to mention how incredibly expensive and time-consuming?! They should quit while they're still ahead, for continuing on their present course can only mean trouble, for themselves and/or the industry as a whole. Oh, and I intend to leave the GIFs on my site where they belong, and to hell with anyone from Unisys that tells me otherwise. (I used Photoshop, so they should be OK...but you never know with these types...) If they persist in this matter, maybe a little Slashdottin' is in order... ^_^
hmm.. if unisys only wants money from people who have created it with programs that are not licensed... then someone should write a gif2gif program and pay the $50000.-- licence for that and then give away the gif2gif programm for free on the web.. the program would convert gif with or without lzw into gif with lzw. if we collect the $50k that should be easy and we would not have to worry about gif anymore.. or maybe someone with money would want to sponsor this.. (redhat? ibm? ..) one would not even need to have downloaded the gif2gif as one could always claim that it was mad with that..(thus the gif2gif should leave the "createy by" string of the original program..)
just an idea..
greetings from vienna, austria.
mond.
I think Unisys trying to enforce the patent on the .GIF format is a classic case of "closing the barn door AFTER the horse has left."
.GIF files tend to download slower than JPEG and PNG files, even on xDSL, cable modem and T1/T3 'Net connections.
.PNG support built in anyway. I'm not sure if the current release of Opera supports .PNG files, though.
The majority of web pages I see on the Web are mostly using JPEG graphics files, with more and more pages using the new Portable Network Graphics (.PNG) format. There's a good reason for this:
I believe that the current versions of Netscape Communicator (4.61) and Internet Explorer (5.0) has
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
If it wasn't for animations, everyone could switch to PNG right now. But all those ads on websites seem to be in need of motion, so GIF will be needed - this is about the only way many websites can make money: by selling ads. Of course there is MNG, the animation format pendant of PNG, but nobody writes software for it (except for JASC, the Paintshop Pro makers - they have some animation program that supports a subset of MNG, I think).
Moreover, there are quite a few old browsers around that still will not give you PNG support, so web designers prefer the format most people will be able to see. If this compatibility is kept forever, there'll never be progress, of course.
BTW, JPEG and GIF don't deal with the same kinds of images - JPEG's for photos, GIF's for images with very few (e.g. 30) colors and large areas of the same color. PNG can store all types of images, also the ones JPEG supports, but PNG does not come close to the compression ratios JPEG gives due to the fact that it's lossy.
I haven't seen any quotes from an excellent article on the Linux Journal website but this is worth reading.
Devout follower of The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.
No, not trying to be flamebait (but any post on /. is ^_^)
Did a little hunting around and found several things..
Yes, the LZ part of LZW was published back in the late 70's - and Unisys's patent says 85 (issued - requested in 83).
There's a publication on the method, dating 84, by Terry Welch (The W in LZW) and since he stilled worked for Unisys, this is probably not considered prior art (and must it be prior to issue or request?).
However, all over the web in various LZW info pages, it is stated repeatedly that LZW was intended for speed, not optimal compression.
These days we have plenty of speed - so why not drop the W modifications and stick to old LZ ?
After all, even Welch said that LZ77/78 were better compressors than LZW!
Which brings to mind the question: Is it possible to create a LZ compressor that outputs data that a LZW decompressor would be able to decompress correctly? We could then avoid the whole problem.
Make GIF compressors that use LZ or some variant but output in a form that LZW decompressors decompress properly.
Anyone wanna give it a try?
Hmmmm.. I don't think this would have much merit but if you had a machine that you sent a gif request to (much like a proxy) and it went and grabbed the gif and converted it to some neural format (PNG) and then cached that conversion, you would be serving the gif (from the original host) only once. Then, as a content server, you should only have to pay one "royalty". I assume that the $5000 license figure came about as an estimate of how many times the patented algorithm is executed per web page. Really this stuff need not be too ad-hoc. It's not like we don't have the technology to count the number of serves of a gif are made from a page.. we do it all the time with advertising stuffs (pay per impression). So if they were serious about enforcing their patent they could say "you will pay us 10 cents for every serve of every gif from your web page" because to display the gif you would have to use their algorithm. At that point you could introduce your Gif Proxy so that every web server doesn't have to set up the system to pay the royalties.. they could just be billed by whoever runs the Gif Proxy. I'm really starting to think that they could manage a system that those who think we should have to pay for the use of this patented algorithm (not me) would consider fair. And that is more frightening than rampant claims of suing people.
How we know is more important than what we know.
A joke is an understatement. And their new TV ads, 'we eat drink and sleep this stuff' or whatever (gee, is this phrase copyrighted?), makes it look like the preface for dumb and dumber. They are, in my opinion, absolute fools, even for a greedy company. In the past years, UNISYS, (hardly something of a great financial success) has been able to leave a bad taste in the mouth of just about anyone even remotely related to computers due to the compuserve thing a few years ago and now this. I'm still in the big iron world. Do they even THINK i'd take a second look at anything they produce since the only trust I have for them would be non-existant? The only use I'd have for their literature would be if I owned a bird or had a puppy I was trying to paper train. I'd be too afraid they'd try and find a way go gouge me down the road. (And yes, I have already rejected consideration of one software product because it was bundled with one of their machines which I stated was unacceptable. We searched and found something as good or better that didn't require bundled hardware AND insured not a penny went to UNISYS.)
Would it make sense to save our GIF images with no compression, and let the web server compress them on the fly?
Hrmm... I was using .png, then I found out IE doesn't read em so I switched back over to .gif. What shall I do? **** Microsoft and all thier minions/followers.
There are gazillion ways to do it in unix. let's see, you can do with shell scripts (gazillion of them), with find and piping shit to sed awk baggage, you can do in Perl, you can do it within emacs, (not sure about vi), but all of them are half-assed. In general, you avoid doing if because it's just a pain in the ass compared to BBEdit.
You you are curious about unix, go ahead and instal PPCLinux, otherwise, there is absolutely no point. (I am a professional web app programer on Linux and Solaris.)
Xah
xah@best.com
http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html
Given that a FREE alternative to GIF's is out there, I think it's pretty bad that they didn't adopt PNG's. At least they'd be setting a VERY positive example...
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
I particularly enjoyed the second paragraph of the Unisys page:
You qualify for the privilege of having our legal department harass you. You qualify for the right to send us a check for US$7500.
You may already be a wiener!
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Feed your family from the kick-ass MP3 player you'll make, and a full MP3 "artists studio" or whatnot. Just a thought. :)
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
I have GIFs on my homepage. The homepage is located on my provider's webserver. Who should pay?
Unisys have no problem with this because Netscape, the producers of the software have paid them money.
I scan an image, click a button and Corel Photopaint uses LZW to compress the image. Again, this is fine because Corel have paid up their license.
Apparently, if I put this file on a geocities page I may owe Unisys a license. If they deem me to be the operator of a Intranet Web site or an Internet Billboard Web site.
If I am such an operator eitherer Corel took care of the licensing issue (and passed part the cost on to me for me) or Unisys are ripping them off.
Either way, all I did was click a button. I didn't shift the bits around myself. I used a licensed algorithm. I don't know or care how it works.
Everyone is proposing new image formats, PNG in particular. Bugger that. I get hardly any people looking at my stuff anyway. The few I do probably don't run browsers that support these uncommon if technically superior formats. Not that I really use images much anyway.
I have sent an email to unisys asking if I need a license and also questioning if the license purchased by Corel covers my if they think I do. I've cc'd it to corel. If the /. effect is in force I bet I don't get an answer.
my blog: good times, man, good times
Not that anyone will read this post.
Utopia is a "possible universe semantic" argument. It says, that if I could create the world to best suit me and everyone in it was free to participate, would they do so? or would they go off and create worlds that served them best. If we assume some form of self interest, we can say that they would go off and form their own worlds, but they would start to get bored with creating a world that's guiding principle is "Lets all worship the creator of this world" being that everyone would leave and go start their own worlds, and start trying to create a world where other people could live with them. Now, excluding what I like to call the Sandra Bollock World where the guiding princple is to have lots of sex with Sandra Bollock, who I assume would be rather fold of a world where she had a number of sex slaves, a lot of people come to the conclusion that the utopian world would converge to a world where all people are free to do what they want. If you were in a world and you weren't free to do whatever you wanted, and you had the power to leave that world at any time and go and start your own world (wheeh) then I'd guess that you wouldn't put up with that world. I say you'd go and start a new world that was exactly like the old world except you can do whatever you want. The last thing you would have in this utopian world is people telling you what to do except for the Bollockians, who quite willing do whatever the hell Sandra says.. but even then the key word is 'willing'. It's a long way to come to a conclusion like that and in no way is this a road map to utopia (all though some space cadets may disagree with me there), but hopefully there is something for us to learn.
None of us live in a Libertarian society, and yet libertarians are always trying to convice us to see things from the libertarian perspective. By definition it is in all of our best interests to live in a utopian society, so like the libertarian, the utopian asks you to see things from a utopian perspective. I have chosen just one of the facets of utopia to ask you to consider, that of a lack of force and authority.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I have a different idea - instead of bowing down to these scumbags demands
/ images/funisys.gif
and having a "burn all GIFs day" - which is giving them exactly what they
want, I suggest having a "just say 'f*ck you, unisys' day" and leave your
GIFs where they are in flat-out defiance of their demands. $5000? ha ha!
how about a nickel after I've spit, p*ssed and sh*t on it?
This p*ssed me off enough that I went ahead and created a button for the
occasion.
http://www.excite-lite.com/members/laughing_boy
Download it, put it on your page, pass it around.
What I said: Re: http://corp2.unisys.com/LeadStory/lzw-license.html You can't buy bad publicity like this. I'm spreading the word. I will never do business with your company again. If this continues to stand, I will be devoting web-space to the issue. Replace that page with a firm mea culpa about-face complete and abject apology for doing something that can only be described as bad manners in the best case and downright evil in the worst case. Shame on you!
Uni$Y$ ?? a joke!! Bullcrud!! Let em hunt down every last damned page all round the world & try and demand a F**KIN license!! Yeah,like they're gonna collect $5000 buckeroos from every site round the world.Screw all this dumb patent crap. In the end, the nerds shall prevail!!
WE should e-mail every stinkin GIF we have to UNYSIS. And mebbe their servers will die a horrible death by crashing.
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Reflection & Cybernet
Open http://corp2.unisys.com/Images/unilogo.g if in The GIMP (1.0.4) and you'll see what I mean. This whole thing is so terribly silly. I wish patents would stop being used in such a way as many large companies do. My 2 cents.
You know, while I was writing that, I kept accidently spelling it "whine" for some reason. :)
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
One of the Netscape 4.0X browsers was the first Netscape browser to support PNG, however, they didn't make an entry in the applications table which would have made it possible to embed it with an OBJECT tag, the same way you can put a gif or jpg in an OBJECT tag. This would provide an easy way to provide backwards compatible images.
I wouldn't be too worried about being sued. I mean, with millions and millions of web sites out there, it will take them forever to sue even a fraction of them before the patent runs out. Unless they've got a brilliant business plan to get a lot of capital, and hire a million lawyers. This still will fail as it will clog the courts and the patent will be long expired by the time any of the cases reach the bench.
Yer well, UNISYS has a the IP and thus they deserve a monopoly and in a monopoly you have the right to charge anything you want. (BTW - in this case italics = sarcasm, or is that cynicism?)
How we know is more important than what we know.
Fuck, Netscape 3 for Linux displays all these PNGs as a broken icon. What can I do?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
By the time Yahoo/Geocities has found out and has contacted ALL its members and received a response back from them, the world will have forgotten Unisys, and Y.G. will not have had time to disable GIF's without giving its users fair warning. Then there's TheGlobe, AngelFire, etc etc . . .
Having the standards for web pages raised through this would be nice though, and maybe force some development for higher-level animations . . .
Let S_n = {nst+us+vt : s,t in Z \ {0}, u,v in {-1,1}}. For all n in Z where |n| > 2, Z \ S_n is infinite... right?
http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/img_png/pnglogo-blk-s ml1.gif
communicator 4.6 supports png files quite well.
There's no such thing as "bad" press.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
K, first thing GIF SUCKS. It's so old that it's not even funny anymore, quit living in the past!! People have sent a frickin robot machine thing to mars, and then CONTROLLED IT FROM EARTH. Do you think that people can do this, but can't create an image format that is better than a dinosaur GIF format? About browsers, there are things called UPDATES, you can get the browser to recognize certain file formats, company's like Microsoft should have *NO* problem doing this whatsoever. The only thing it would take is a little bit of time...
Even if everybody on the internet suddenly took down all gif pictures,
I would be willing to bet big bucks that Unisys would then try to get
(usage fees) out of everybody who had ever used a gif image on their
website. Any takers on that bet?
Unisys seems to be acting like the corporate veraion of a spoiled child.
"I want it all and I want it my way and I want it NOW"
If Unisys really wants the $5000 license, they can try to sue.
Evidently they have not taken into consideration the the hundreds of
thousands of websites displaying gifs. They would spend far more than
they would ever make in fees trying to sue everybody.
After all, it is up to then to PROVE that the gifs were made with
unlicensed software. the burden of proof is on them, not the person
displaying the gif. Especially since Unisys refuses to provide a
detailed listing of licensed software.
And yep, I agree, Unisys has way too many bean counters and lawyers on
the payroll.
Oh yes, My profession? I am a professional website designer.
And I have seen far too many Unisys foulups to take them very seriously.
Personally I doubt that they could do a lunch meeting without suing each
other for dessert.
My company makes software that uses GIFs... you would not BELIEVE the bullshit these guys put you through.
Because of our license agreement with UNISYS, all of our customers are required to register with them before they can use our software. (We did this because we could not afford to license the technology out right.) Basically they have to get a special code to enter into our software before the GIF stuff will work. They also require some of our customers to pay an extra fee WHICH THEY DETERMINE ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS! "Hmmm, how much you got?"
The worst part is most of our customers are non-profit government entities who don't have a lot of money to start with. In these cases UNISYS says that they can get the code for free, but requires them to pay a 500 dollar processing fee.
grr....
If the Ozone Hole were a hoax, how can you explain that frogs are disappearing worldwide? You don't hear about it much in the news because it's not news: "Ozone Hole Still Getting Worse"? Global warming, likewise, is real and getting worse.
Does anybody understand _why_ Unisys persues this? I might understand if they were a tiny setup and just somehow acquired the LZW patent in hopes to become really rich.
But Unisys is a very big player, they do al sorts of things. This gives them a lot of bad press, over (for them) a smallish non-issue! The way I see it it could make more sense to give LZW to the world, in order to get themselves some nice ride-the-open-source-wave publicity.
Of course, if the cash they virtually counted would really stream in, it _would_ probably worthwhile. But there's little chance of that, for reasons named all over this discussion: GIF is becoming outdated about _now_, there are alternatives and it's hard to enforce this anyway.
man, what an under-performing stock. Short this sucker.
Anyone remember .Z files? gunzip can uncompress them, but gzip can't create them. That's because they use Unisys' state-of-the-art patented LZW algorithm. You need to use compress(1) to create them (people used to alias compress to a shorter name). Of course, the gzip algorithm gives (slightly) better results.
/. poll showed that 0% of all users prefer .Z!
In fact, a recent
2 dashes and a space, or just 2 dashes?
The Open Source movement is a perfect example of what comes of people who do things for their sheer love of the craft, rather than being motivated by finances. :)
Thankfully, for every commercial Unix, there is a Linux. For every GIF, there is a PNG. And for every Windows that rears it's ugly head, there is a Wine.
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
The FSF do support PNG, this is what they say on their page about the GIF patent:
PNG format is a patent-free compressed format. We hope it will become widely supported; then
we will use it. We do have PNG versions of the images on this server
--
Since Netscape 4.04 and IE 4, PNG is natively supported (at least on Winblows). They still don't handle alpha channels correctly, but we can live without that.
http://www.cdrom.com/pub/mng/
/sounds/ cool.
:-) It
The spec is finalised, which is cool. Now we just have to wait for some cool hacker to put it in Mozilla. Screw IE, it can't even show PNGs semi-properly, except on Win32 platforms (Mac, etc, ports are b0rked).
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Oh sure, is every single bit of whatever patent you worked SOOO hard for really your own creation?
I'm sure that pythagorous and einstein and newton were quite happy to share their knowledge so people like you can use it as a subset of your so called "creations" and not share. Thats really pathetic.
I mean, patents make me sick. They inflate the price of everything while at the same time deny you many opportunities. Take the drug companies for example - one won't let the other use their patent - which means that certain cures and medicines are never found!!! Is this *really* benifitial for humanity?
Sure, your feeding your family while denying those less fortunate to yourself access to these drugs. Third world countries are at the mercy of commercial drug companies because they won't share the information on how to manufacture.
No man is an island.
From what I read at their site, it seems like if you use GIFs from unlicensed software, then you need a license, but not if they were generated from unlicensed software (as /. indicated). I quote:
They go on to say that licensed software might not license all images produced from it, but the Unysis demand is a far cry from the witch-hunt indicated in the article summary.
You mean some pervert hacked Lynx to show images?!?
I think I'm going to be sick....
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
2) Exactly what should we do as web site operators? I realize that the best thing is to switch everything to .png, however, the question is when, if ever? (I do plan to, myself). I know that Burn all Gifs day is yet set, but question is, when if any is Unisys Police going to start combing the web sites? Right now is not the best time for me (defense is within a month) though I'll find the time if the UP will be out soon enough...
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
IIRC ZIP-files are also using LZW. of course, the license stuff probably applies to that too, but why aren't they talking about it at all? I'm just curious...
Sure is embarassing when your dumb mistake is in the title of the post ...
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Okay, first off, I have to include a disclaimer. This is for MY protection, because I don't want some AC suing me over erroneous or really poor legal advice. This isn't legal advice. This is personal advice, given as a person. Coupled with my personal interpretation of the license. You should under no circumstances take this is as law, or even an attempt at being a lawyer. I'm just another guy. Further questions? Call Unisys.
.tar.gz of the Gimp. Fax them your GIFs. Snail mail them diskettes and CD-ROMs containing GIFs. Include a letter stating that you are protesting their childish and hostile behaviour towards what is considered, for the most part, the standard image format for the web.
:)
That out of the way.. here's what it means.
First off, if you run a website, get out the checkbook. You aren't permitted to serve up GIFs without the license from Unisys. That's right; you can't serve LZW-containing content without a license from Unisys.
Secondly, use gimp? Welp, get out the checkbook. You owe Unisys $5000. Use gd pre-PNG? Make that check payable to "Unisys Corporation." Use Adobe Photoshop to make web content? The address to send the check to is on Unisys' website.
Lastly, do you view things with LZW compression in them? Well, better get a fresh pen. Unless you're using a 'licensed' viewer, you owe Unisys another $5000.
So, in short, what does it mean overall?
Use anything at all using LZW, ie; GIF89a images? Welp, you owe Unisys 5 grand just to look at 'em.
Now, can Unisys enforce this? Unfortunately, yes. In part. They can and will hunt down every piece of software with LZW compression, and demand $5000 or threaten to sue. They've done it before. They can't control the websites, but they're counting on the fear factor for that. And if they control the content creation, they don't really need to worry about serving it.
Now, why's Unisys doing this? I can't say for sure. Maybe because they've been in a steady rate of decline? Maybe because they got new lawyers? Maybe because they just want to get a new CEO by bidding a $30mil package, and this is an effective way to finance it.
Either way, this is something that can't be ignored. And Unisys won't just forget about it. Batten down the hatches, and protest. Raise hell. Make Unisys miserable. Find new and creative ways to legally harass them. Email them every last one of your GIFs. Email them a complete
Let's show these pricks we mean business. I don't know about you, but I've got an old IBM ProPrinterII cranking, the TD light on my modem is lit solid, and I'm changing 3.5" diskettes every few minutes. In the meantime, let's all switch to JPEG or PNG.
VIVA LA REVOLUTION!
-RISCy Business | Rabid System Administrator and BOFH
your company here.
shelby != ford
I always use PNG for any web development, except cricumstances where JPEG is better. IIRC correctly, GIF is stuck in the land of 256 colors... PNG is my lossless format of choice, and people are complaining about how PNG sucks because web browsers have issues with them, but this is clearly NOT the graphic format fault, but the fault of the implementation. One thing that GIF has that PNG lacks is animation (I think). Of course for a website there is always javascript for that, but that sucks.. I never use animated GIFs, and I especially will never now...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Yes, it's gif2png!
/ gif2png-0.6.zip
:-)
ftp://swrinde.nde.swri.edu/pub/png/applications
Compiles most places. Wonderful little thing takes regexps (gif2png *.gif).
Now, to make a program that scans through all HTML files replacing gif with PNG... Or, you could just add an Apache URL translator rule and not edit the HTML at all
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
This looks to me like the classic legal tactic of claiming the earth and sky and seeing if anyone will actually buy in. For this to work, either (1) a noticeable percentage of web-site operators will have to go along with it and (2) it will have to survive a court challenge.
If funding and organization can be found, it would probably be a Good Thing to attempt a defense against the highly dubious legal theories this is based on. Hmmmm...I wonder if the H2O project might be interested.
This Unisys story remembers me something I read on The Onion last year. It was about Bill Gates patenting the binary system, ultimately demanding a tax on everything. I really want to see how Unisys are going to tax millions of users all over the world.
Just another thing, have you noticed that the PNG Now! button is a GIF? http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/img_pn g/pngnow.gif
Your ignorance is astounding. He would not be forcing anyone to do anything, is this difficult to comprehend? And who are you to tell him WHAT his motivations or reasons for doing anything should be? You are the one who is trying to force someone to behave in a specific manner. You are the one who is telling him to get a job and he must give away his work to benefit humanity. Is he telling you that you MUST patent your ideas or discoveries?
I'll be converting all my gifs right now.
Only 'flamers' flame!