- From: Daniel Phillips <phillips@bonn-fries.net>
- Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2001 23:09:42 +0200
- To: Glenn Randers-Pehrson <glennrp@home.com>, www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
On October 3, 2001 05:09 pm, Glenn Randers-Pehrson wrote: > >Do you remember what happened to GIF as a format? Everyone used it, but as > >the patent was called and it started to cost, it virtually vanished within > >a month. > > Nothing of the sort actually happened. GIF is still going strong. > Commercial software developers paid the tribute. Support of GIF's > replacement, PNG by the major browser makers has been abysmal, even > though PNG was released as W3C's first Recommendation 5 years ago. > > Freeware developers, however, were forced to drop GIF support. DuPont, > for example, was forced by UniSys to stop distributing ImageMagick, > and ImageMagick was forced to stop distributing binaries with LZW > support. > > Glenn Randers-Pehrson (PNG, MNG, libpng, pngcrush, ImageMagick) Yes, sad but true. It is for this reason that we must not allow SVG in its current RAND-tainted form to become a defacto standard, or to be perceived by the public as a standard. Given the near-universal sense of outrage that has been expressed so far it is not unreasonable to assume that the non-technical public, too, will be able to grasp the issues and will respond as we have. For non-technical web users, it comes down to a question of whether they are happy to be forced to pay for something that is normally free, like the air we breathe. -- Daniel
Received on Wednesday, 3 October 2001 17:09:57 UTC