On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 09:54:29AM +0200, Andreas Barth wrote: > * Kevin B. McCarty (kmccarty@Princeton.EDU) [040706 15:55]: > > My understanding is that the last known patent on LZW compression held > > by Unisys, in Canada, expires tomorrow, July 7th 2004. I plan to ask my > > sponsor, Bas Zoetekouw, to upload a version of cernlib with compressed > > GIF creation support added back in soon afterwards. (This may be > > delayed several days from the expiry date due to some real-life > > obligations I have.) Any objections? > > I agree with that. I myself have some other gif-producing code I want > to upload. This issue has been discussed in February, and the outcome > was to me that it is ok to upload gif-producing code, even as there is > a patent hold by IBM. This IBM patent (4,814,746) is on LZMW, not LZW. Entirely different algorithm, related only by the fact that they are both LZ78 derivatives, and that two of the authors had surnames beginning with the same letter. I assume that it really is LZW that is used in gif, and that unisys haven't been stringing us along for the past few years. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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