Has anyone considered asking Sperry (or whoever owns the patents these
days) whether it would give similar blessing?
There are several different patents. Sperry/Unisys owns the patent for the
LZW compression algorithm, a variant of which is used in the UNIX 'compress'
program, but other algorithms are claimed by others.
There are also some additional patents that may cover this technology that are
owned, I believe, by IBM. This has the effect of making any permission obtained
from Sperry suspect in its own right, since I don't think it is clear whose
patents are in effect.
The LZ77 algorithms
that some would like to use aren't covered under Sperry's patent.
I suggest that we review the work done by the GNU folks in this area in more
detail. It looks like they have covered a lot of this territory and have
dealt with most of the issues.
Ned