Compress command and the old BuilCD application on Red Hat Enterprise 4 WS

[Rick Stevens]

inode0 wrote:
> On 9/16/05, Rick Stevens <rstevens at vitalstream.com> wrote:
> 
>>I wouldn't recommend "compress" as it used an algorithm that has some
>>copyright problems (Honeywell-Bull was insisting on license fees not
>>too far back).  It's better to use gzip (which uses Lempel-Ziv, is
>>copyright-free and compresses better than "compress") or bzip2 (which
>>is also copyright-free and compresses better than gzip).  The vast
>>majority of modern systems have gzip available, and most also have
>>bzip2.
> 
> 
> I think you are recalling patent issues. All of these programs have copyrights.

Yes, you're right, and it was specific to LZ78 and owned by Unisys.
gzip doesn't use LZ78, it uses a variant of it and is free of the
patent problem.  bzip2 uses Burrows-Wheeler and Huffman encoding.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-   To err is human.  To forgive, a large sum of money is needed.    -
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