April 26, 2000
Untitled
I hate it when companies have to cave in to this type of pressure.
“If we let every company that writes a tiny, trivial piece of software get a patent license from everyone who wants to have a Web site, then the Web becomes impossible.”
Agreed. Frankly, the story of the GIF image format using a patented compression algorithm owned and controlled by Unisys is old news. However, what puts a new spin on the tale, is that earlier this month AccuWeather announced that it was going to stop distributing information using the GIF format and instead use the open PNG format. This is fine and dandy if your browser supports PNG, as most recent desktop versions do, but what about handheld devices? I foresee a whole new business being built around converting PNG formatted pages so they can be browsed on PDA-based web clients. The fee you would pay for this type of service would then kick back to Unisys for use of the GIF creation code. Looking for another curious twist? Unisys operates their own weather information service.
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