LZW and legal stuff
Michael A. Peters
mpeters at mac.com
Thu Jan 13 06:19:18 UTC 2005
LZW patent is no longer valid, according to Unisys themselves.
What are the chances (I guess lawyers need to get involved etc.) of
using LZW packages with Fedora?
For example - giflib, lzw compression kit for libtiff, etc.
It does look like the version of gd that ships with Fedora Core has gif
functionallity added back into by the upstream developer, and Fedora
did not patch it out - is that just an oversight or are you comfortable
with lzw compression now that the Unisys patent has expired?
If there are no *other* legal issues, I think lzw compression kit for
libtiff would definitely be good, the new version of gimp apparently
has better support for raw images from various digital cameras, and lzw
compressed tiff is a good way to share tiff images between operating
systems at a small filesize (IE sending images to stock photo company)
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