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GIF Format Patent to Expires Today

Fri, 06/20/2003 - 11:59 — xerexes
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Slashdot has the story: the GIF Patent expires on June 20, 2003, otherwise forevermore to be known as GIF Liberation Day.

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Fri, 06/20/2003 - 13:09 — FractalDragon
FractalDragon's picture

Re: GIF Format Patent to Expires Today

About time...

Now, I'm not against people getting credit, recognition and/or compensation for their work and ideas, but some of the crap around GIF boarderd on extortion.

Sun, 06/22/2003 - 01:43 — gwalla
gwalla's picture

GIF and PNG

I sure hope this doesn't put a dent in acceptance of PNG.

Mon, 06/23/2003 - 18:47 — zwol
zwol's picture

Re: GIF and PNG

It's unfortunate, but what'll continue to make GIF the choice over PNG (even though PNG is superior to GIF) is MSIE's lack of proper support for PNG. Since the majority of surfers are using MSIE, many webmasters/artits restrict themselves from using cool PNG capabilities like true alpha transparency. For example, take a look at this page in both MSIE and in Mozilla, Opera or another fully PNG-capable browser.

And it looks like we'll be stuck with the current, inadequate version of MSIE for some time to come.

Mon, 06/23/2003 - 20:05 — zwol
zwol's picture

Re: GIF and PNG

Please, allow me to amend that statement- Internet Explorer for Windows doesn't support PNG fully. Internet Explorer for Mac should render it fine. But then again, we're talking market share, and Windows users far outnumber Mac users at this point.