No argument, here. I'm curious what the FSF take on this is. gzip will decompress .Z files which use the same compression as GIF and the FSF folks had determined that this did not violate the patent. Sounds like Unisys might be knocking on RMS' door. Anybody have the patent number and/or the date of expiration? It's been around for quite a while. R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: oberman(a)es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634

Oliver> jareth(a)camelot.co.jp (P. E. Jareth Hein) writes: Oliver> He means leave the stuff in the source, but only build Oliver> binary tarballs without it. So someone who does not care Oliver> about Unisys can still get gif support ;-) That's probably what Andy meant, but it still leaves Jareth exposed for sure, and the maintainership in general. It's not ethical, IMHO. If somebody really cares about GIF support, I suggest doing what Ghostscript does, which is implement GIF support using a pluggable filter which makes the bitstream look like LZW although no (de)compression is necessarily done. Then document use of LZW as arguably (at least by braindead lawyers) illegal, and say "if you happen to know of an LZW decompressor that satisfies the following specs, here's how to plug it in." Two leading candidates are the "Ghostscript filter" interface (at the LZW in C code level) and (at a higher "streams" level) using tmp files and gif2png or giftoppm|ppmtopng. (The former is not legal if gifreader isn't, so we can't advocate it, the latter is covered by the legacy code clause. Of course, IANAL. Why does "I Am Not A Lawyer" abbreviate to "I anal"? Shouldn't it be the other way around?) I don't think this would be appropriate with Jareth's code, as it is clearly not covered by the legacy clause. However, if I find the implementation time, my personal XEmacs will, upon attempting to read a GIF file, barf up the "hitchhiker logo" (you know, VM's help button) in an appropriate size, overlaid with the text "This is not the GIF you requested. In fact, it's a PNG, not a GIF at all. This is due to Legal Action by Unisys. To complain to Unisys about their proto-simian legal staff, <click here>. Meantime, convert your gifs to PNG and I'll be glad to display 'em." Clicking, of course, will pop up a mail buffer pre-addressed to some appropriate input port on the Unisys domain. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +1 (298) 53-5091