On Fri, 14 Jan 2005, Hannah Schroeter wrote:
Hello!
On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 10:38:02PM -0800, william(at)elan.net wrote:
[...]
Since patents are evil we should not be using GIF.
Perhaps I should have added ":)" because I was only partially serious.
But in particular regarding GIF, Unisys threatened to (and did) go after
companies that did not pay it royalties. They said that either company
that produces software that creates GIF should pay them (1% of the cost
of the software) OR if it was open-source or free software (which author
did not pay negotiate agreement to pay royalties) but the produced GIF
and that GIF file is being used in commercial website then the website
owner should pay Unisis royalties. That got a lot of people very angry
and quickly grew into "burn all gifs" campaign and many quickly moved to
using PNG (and as Wayne already noted PNG can support the same as GIF
and software such as explorer will work fine with that - its additional
features of PNG that some software sometimes have problems with).
Regarding why it all happened - you can blame it on Compuserve (which
invented GIF but used patented algorithm - Compuserve unlike what some
believe did not have patent on GIF, they got a license from Unisys), see
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/Gif/unisys.html
As mentioned before http://burnallgifs.org/archives/ provides the details
and why we should not be using GIF (but its correct to note that patent
did indeed expire and is no longer a problem)
If patents are evil, why are things like Sender ID or DK sometimes
discussed here?
Well "Sender ID" is evil in itself and that its patented and Microsoft
refuses to provide license that everyone can use makes it a Double EVIL :)
And as I mentioned in one of the very first messages on ietf-mailsig
there was prior art to what is in DK draft so I'm not certain their
patent would hold up in court either if closely looked at.
Why we discuss it - because large corporations are trying to force
these technologies on to everyone often for their own special interests
and they refuse to consider that what they proposed might not be the
best way of doing email authentication.
In reality situation is such that while these companies have some good
idea, the total design has serious flows and causes many false-negatives.
There are ways their ideas can be used to create better design that would
not have much better false-negative rate, but because these companies
see those modifications as not being within their patent, they typically
would refuse to consider them.
So why are the patents evil for us? Because in creation of standards
what happens is that if there exist patent that in the same area, then
organization producing the standard is often:
1. Forced modify good technical design into slightly less good one just
so it could avoid certain patent(s).
2. Pressured to not modify presented proposal and not accept better
design because key player in the process wants it done exactly as
its written in its patent.
---
William Leibzon, Elan Networks:
mailto: william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net
Anti-Spam and Email Security Research Worksite:
http://www.elan.net/~william/emailsecurity/