On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 11:51:05AM -0500, Delirium wrote:
Peter Gervai wrote:
Dunno about any problems with GIF *decoding*, but
you surely cannot
*create*
compressed GIFs without paying.
That's no longer true, as the GIF patent has expired everywhere except
Canada, where it will expire in 2 weeks. According to the League for
Programming Freedom's page on the issue, expiration dates are:
* US: June 20, 2003
* UK, France, Germany, Italy: June 18, 2004
* Japan: June 20, 2004
* Canada: July 7, 2004
Once the Canadian one expires in 12 days, I see no reason to continue
prohibiting people from using GIFs. Of course, whether there's any
advantage to GIFs over PNGs is another issue, but if we choose not to
use GIFs, it should be for a non-legal reason, and we should probably
not be anal about absolutely prohibiting them.
Thank you for this correction! I haven't followed the dates thoroughly, and
it seems that GIFs indeed have no further patent problems.
Still I'd prefer PNG and JPEG instead of GIF, but that's completely a matter
of taste from now on.
The rest of the topic probably still valid though as most video codecs have
not expired patents (unless they expired in the meantime and me being
ignorant again).
Thanks,
Peter