Writing GIFs

[Craig Dickson <crdic@pacbell.net>]

I realize I am a terrible person for wanting to violate Unisys's
patents, but I'm working on a web site that I think will often be
visited by people with old browsers (it's the site for the elementary
school my daughter attends), so rather than use PNGs, I think I'd be
better off with GIFs. GIMP 1.2, even with the gimp-nonfree package,
seems only to read GIFs, not write them. Does anyone know of a good,
free-at-least-as-in-beer Linux program to translate PNGs and/or BMPs to
compressed GIFs? If not, I guess I'll have to use Microsoft Photo Editor
on Windows...

Thanks,

Craig