Re: Let's fork GD!

> At 23:05 11/04/2002 -0700, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote: > > > On Friday, 12. April 2002 06:53, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote: > > > > Well, I don't actually see a license problem for non-LZW compressed gifs. > > > > But I am still not sure supporting GIF is a productive thing to do. The > > > > format needs to die. No sense helping it stay alive. > > > > > > > +1 > > > I think its not a good idea to support gif-format. We have a lot of > > > alternative formats. > > > >We could compromise and support reading of GIF files. That way you can > >still use GIF image files from places, but you would write them back out > >as pngs. > > Good idea. BTW are you sure that the patent is only on the LZW? The Unisys patent is definitely only on what are called LZ-78 type compression algorithms of which LZW is one. Actually, IBM has a similar patent, but only Unisys has made noises about enforcing it. See: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html For a good explanation of the current status. They verify there that reading of LZW-GIF files is perfectly ok. It is only creating them that is an issue. The patent does expire in 2003 though. -Rasmus