Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: LibGd and LZW

Author:Arnold V. Lesikar
Posted:8/29/1999; 1:36:08 PM
Topic:GIFs get expensive
Msg #:10204 (In response to 10200)
Prev/Next:10203 / 10205

Sorry, Eric, I missed your point. I guess I am even slower on the uptake on Sundays than in the rest of the week. I didn't look sufficiently closely at Don Haskins' long message 10172. I didn't see the follow-up 10179 at all.

It's of course not a matter of distributing a new version of libGd. LibGd is out there already in versions using RLE and LZW.

The legal situation is certainly very unclear. But it looks to me, that playing safe to avoid legal difficulties has a large cost of its own. The support for PNG is apparently far less broad than that for GIF, and PNG won't do some things that GIF will - namely animation. (There's MNG of course, but that seems not be even as far along as PNG). So it looks to my innocent eyes like you are hobbling yourself if you switch to PNG.

Jump to PNG and you cover your a** legally, but break things. With Gif, you have an unknown legal exposure, but your websites work, and you have lots of tools, including libGd.

Cripple yourself, or risk a suit. Hell of a choice.

I'm gonna keep on doin' what I'm doin', until the legal situation clears up.

Of course, being in the academic rather than in the commercial arena, I'm probably running less risk than other people.

arn

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:52:15 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.