< The last two are things we might could borrow for use in MIME.
< Yes, I think we all agree that compression is badly needed. The reason
< we've never had it, though, is that all the compression schemes --
< including these -- are reportedly under a legal cloud that makes them
< inappropriate for IETF standardization. If this is true, it applies to
< the 1154 document equally as it applies to MIME. If this is not true, I
< want to know, because I will then be EAGER to reopen the discussion of the
< right way to do compression in MIME. (Actually, I think it's really easy
< -- I think a "compressed64" content-transfer-encoding is all we really
< need. Well, maybe also a "compressed" without the "64" for enclaves that
< have binary transport....) -- Nathaniel
Yes, those compression schemes have patents behind them. Is this really any
worse than providing for a postscript type? Using it also has legal issues
behind it, but we've glossed over them because Adobe has given its blessing.
Has anyone considered asking Sperry (or whoever owns the patents these days)
whether it would give similar blessing?
Tony Hansen
hansen(_at_)pegasus(_dot_)att(_dot_)com,
tony(_at_)attmail(_dot_)com
att!pegasus!hansen, attmail!tony
P.S. I thought Sperry (or whoever) came out and publicly said that the
patents would only be enforced for hardware/firmware implementations.