Re: Apple and PNG?

On November 19, 2001 01:44 am, Adam Warner wrote:
> > From: tom poe (tompoe@renonevada.net)
> > Date: Sat, Nov 17 2001
> 
> > Hi:  Came across this article re: Apple's PNG and MNG nonsense
> > 
> > http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/22898.html
> > 
> > One more timely example of the need to draw a clear line for these folks.
> > How are you doing?  Need a bigger crayola?  Man, this is just ridiculous.
> 
> Quoting Greg Roelofs (member, PNG Group; author, PNG: The Definitive
> Guide; maintainer, PNG and MNG home sites; hacker, lots of PNG-related
> tools)
> 
> http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-11-16-019-20-NW-CY-LL-0018
> 
> "The PNG group (which includes at least one or two members of the W3C's
> SVG team, btw) did discuss the Apple patent several weeks ago, and we
> decided it was completely irrelevant to PNG itself, almost certainly
> irrelevant to the pnmtopng utility and to PNG's animated extension, MNG,
> and probably irrelevant to SVG, as well. And that's where the
> discussion--and the "perturbation"--ended, for the most part. In short,
> PNG alpha is identical to the version described in Porter and Duff's
> 1984 SIGGRAPH paper, which precedes Apple's filing by 8 years."

Yes, unfortunately, W3C still seems determined to hold to the fiction that 
it's too hard to fix SVG so that any possible dependency on Apple's (probably 
bogus) patent is eliminated.  It is apparently much easier for W3C to help 
Apple patent the standard, which is the situtation as it stands now.

SVG is patented guys, make no mistake about it.  It is patented because W3C 
is too weak-kneed to do anything about it.

--
Daniel

Received on Tuesday, 20 November 2001 17:23:39 UTC