Re: Re(2): Sort of OT: Graphics in Frame

[jeremy@xxxxxxxxx (Jeremy H. Griffith)]

On Thu, 7 Sep 2000 16:37:57 -0400, jonesbk@lucent.com wrote:

>I'm kinda leaning away from GIF and TIFF because of the copyright issues of
>the LZW compression. Whatever I format choose will be in use for a long
>time. I'm a little scared that support for applications using LZW
>compression, especially the GIF, is going to dry up as businesses move
>towards free formats.

Very real concern.  Unisys has nothing to lose by making up new rules
for extracting money from anyone who has ever seen a GIF <g>, and has
shown itself to be, ah, less than forthright about its licensing.

In addition to GIF and (some) TIFF graphics, LZW compression (which
is what Unisys has a patent on one corner of, the "W" part ;-) was
used by Acrobat 3.  Guess what?  It's gone from Acrobat 4... so it
appears that Adobe also took this risk seriously enough to stop
using a format in PDFs that could expose their customers to some
undeterminable liability to Unisys in the future... a smart move.

It's too bad this legal issue has to overshadow technical issues,
but it does.  Our own solution, for the Web, has been to use JPEGs,
regardless of the "anomalies" (which we've never seen) or the use
of "lossy" compression (which doesn't seem to affect the appearance).
There's nothing else that is supported by all browsers (PNG is not),
and that is also free of legal entanglements that could cost your
company big bucks and you your job...


-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  (jeremy@omsys.com)  http://www.omsys.com/

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