30 Jan
2006
30 Jan
'06
3:08 a.m.
I guess the main thing that pisses me off about GIF is
the "indian
giver" nature of it. First they "give" it to the "community"
for
everyone to use with a free license and then once everyone's
dependent upon it they start suing people for not paying license
fees.
Not quite - the two "they"s (the one that gave and the one that took)
are different. (Also, it wasn't GIF per se that was taken, but LZW,
including other uses of LZW such as compress(1). GIF just happened to
be defined to use LZW and nothing else, though it turns out to be easy
to write GIF-compatible minimally-compressed files without infringing
the LZW patent - easier than writing "real GIF" files with LZW,
actually. When I was working for HASC I was one of two people who
wrote code that does that - Google for miGIF and Hutchison (amusingly,
(at least) one of the pages mis-credits me as "der Maus").)
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