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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Unisys, GIFs and KDE-1.1.2 :is it too late to gif2png  all the gifs?
From:       Andreas Pour <pour () mieterra ! com>
Date:       1999-08-30 6:47:48
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Duncan Haldane wrote:

> With the recent renewed fuss about Unisys Corps' much more aggressive
> position on GIF usage (see ESR's article on /. today) and the new claims
> posted on Unisys' web site (USD5000 for a license to serve
> GIFS you cannot prove were produced with a Unsisys-licensed
> program on your Web Site, or else ...),
> maybe the decision to leave KDE-1.1.x with included GIF components, and
> only clean up 2.0, should be revisited.

Hmm, call my hyper-techical, but how does "serving" a gif possibly violate the
patent?  AFAIK the patent is for compression and decompression of data using the LZW
algorithm.  A website serving gifs does neither, does not use the LZW algorithm and
hence needs no stinkin' license, Unisys extortion attempts notwithstanding.

Regards,

Andreas Pour

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