GIF announcement from CompuServe

Just a couple days ago CompuServe, Inc. made an announcement that for all 
pratical purposes kills GIF as a format usable by the WWW and in HTML-based 
email, etc.
Basically the provisions of their announcement are:
1) GIF uses LZW compression which is patented by UniSys. CompuServe has 
permission to license people to use LZW in GIF but they have many very scary 
provisions of their agreement (which I will post in full tomorrow):
2) They are charging a license fee of $.15 per copy or 1.5% of the gross 
sale price of your product, whichever is greater. All users of your software 
must be registered before they can get your software. This essentially means 
that freeware and shareware CANT USE GIF.
3) Even more importantly, GIF can only be used in conjunction with the 
CompuServe information service.
4) If you sign their license agreement, if for any reason in the future the 
agreement is broken, including their one-sided termination of the agreement, 
you must stop using GIF code, images, and return to them any copies of the 
specification.

I can go on at much more length about the details of all this stuff, but my 
conclusion is that GIF is gone as a standard image format. All of my 
information comes from official documents posted by CompuServe on their own 
service.

Alex Hopmann
ResNova Software, Inc.

Received on Sunday, 1 January 1995 22:50:43 UTC