Re: RTF - proprietary or open?

Mike McCarty wrote:
> They why was there a big flap when Unisys restricted use of GIF?

Unisys held a patent covering LZW compression. Unisys did not create the GIF format. The GIF format was created by CompuServe. Neither did Unisys write the 'compress' program. But both implemented an algorithm considered to be an implementation of lzw compression and therefore both were blocked by the Unisys patent until it expired. Neither GIF nor compress authors were aware of the patent when they created their implementations.

AFAICT the last lzw patent has expired. At this time there is no restriction on using either gif or compress however IANAL.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compress
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF

Bob

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