GIF/LZW Patent expires in europe

[Ni72ous]

According to the Inquirer, the GIF/LZW patent covering europe has now expired.

Read about it here.

[Adasha]

Well thank God for that, and may I be the first to say screw you Unisys!

Anyway, we should all have moved on to PNG a looong time ago. Screw IE too!

[Waccoon]

Ho hum.  I'm moving my whole website to PNG images, now that I finally can save PNG files smaller than GIFs.

I doubt PNG will become any more popular until Photoshop support of the format stops sucking.  I mean, the average PNG saved in Photoshop is still loads bigger than any GIF.  What the hell is Adobe's problem?!  Then again, aftermarket plugins aren't much better.  I have the SuperPNG plugin for Photoshop from Fnord, and the files it produces are still too damn big even with the metadata stripped out!

PngOut by Ken Silverman is a godsend for web authors.  Ken Silverman ROCKS, and I'm surprised a person with his intuition isn't working for some megacorp.  I wish someone could make a GUI version , though (PNG Gauntlet is a .NET front-end for PngOut, but it's too damn buggy and more trouble than it's worth).

[gnarly]

Ahem:

"Our reader Janne Paalijärvi from Finland noticed something odd about the dates in the recent article about the expiration of the Unisys patent on LZW compression in Europe. I stand corrected: the patent expires June 18 in UK, Germany, France and Italy, and two days later in Japan."

[justthatgood]

I think that all software patents are a bunch of BS.  Especially those %@#$!^ SOB's that are using software patents to screw people over with the JPEG's.