I'd be in favor of eliminating all GIFs from the site. Although I'm personally comfortable with GIFs, I think we have a large userbase
from the free software community who aren't. And software patents
are
evil.
You're right, but there are many people who don't know about these things. If they can't upload a GIF they created they might not upload it at all, or they might save the picture as JPEG what is very suboptimal in most cases. So there should at least be a statement why we don't accept GIFs, and that they should use PNG instead. It would be even better if people are still allowed to upload GIFs after a message that we'd like PNGs much more. The GIFs could be listed on a page and someone with a batch converter could change them once in a while. And while we are trying to treat images like articles, maybe the GIF could REDIRECT to the PNG?
Kurt