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List:       kde
Subject:    Re: What's up with the GIF support?
From:       Arnt Gulbrandsen <agulbra () troll ! no>
Date:       1999-04-13 16:01:28
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Kevin Fisher <kfisher@rim.net>
> True...I think it is time to abandon GIF altogether and go forward.  The
> sad thing is, years ago when this whole thing started people were willing
> to try new image formats...then things cooled off, and everyone forgot
> about the whole patent mess and continued on as though nothing had
> changed.

Are you saying the unisys patent was known in the late eighties, when
GIF was new?

>  Now the Unisys lawyers are back and everyone is wondering what
> the big deal is.....
> 
> I wonder how this will affect other projects like Mozilla...?  What if
> they can't legally put GIF support in the freeware browser (but the
> commercial browsers like IE can)?

Netscape has a license, I believe. Other people wanting to compile
mozilla are on their own.

> PNG is a good format...there was a good writeup about it recently on
> Slashdot.

And you believed it?

>  I understand that animated PNG's are not far away, either.

Not far away :) 3m or so from where I sit.  The PNG format supports
animation; libpng does not.  Warwick (warwick@troll.no) contributed
the necessary code to make it do that; but at present it looks like
the code isn't going to be included.

However, MNG-ultralight is coming along.

(If the slashdot writeup didn't mention MNG in the context of PNG and
animation, it wasn't a good writeup.)

--Arnt
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