The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

Posted Mar 23, 2004 23:37 UTC (Tue) by vblum (guest, #1151)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

I thought the problem with xv was that the author, out of protest against Unisys' (expired) LZW patent, had stopped all development. His anger was directed at the fact that Unisys had sent him an invoice for royalties for the gif format.

I hope my memory is not failing me, else this is all a bunch of hogwash. If I remember this right, then we owe the absence of xv to Unisys. Of course, a truly free application could be forked even now, long after the original author lost interest.

Second to Last: I seem to recall that Mosfet's applications, for a while, had a superb reputation - pixie? is it still around? is it the right app type?

Last: The Gimp is all nice and well, but as long a I can't figure out how to _draw_ a simple, silly circle on a canvas other than free hand, it is something of a failure regarding usability.

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[OT] circles in GIMP

Posted Mar 23, 2004 23:43 UTC (Tue) by im14u2c (subscriber, #5246) [Link]

One way to draw a circle in GIMP: Use the ellipse select tool, and press Shift while clicking and dragging the mouse. Pressing Shift constrains the selection to be circular. Once you've selected a circular area, you can either stroke the selection with the current brush (Under "Edit->Stroke"), change the selection to a path, or fill the selection. It all depends on what you want to do with the circle.

[OT] circles in GIMP

Posted Mar 23, 2004 23:47 UTC (Tue) by im14u2c (subscriber, #5246) [Link]

... granted, drawing circles w/ GIMP is a bit like finding 2 + 2 by evaluating the integral of 2dx over the range 0..2.

[OT] circles in GIMP

Posted Apr 1, 2004 15:58 UTC (Thu) by madrabbit (guest, #20600) [Link]

Actually, that's calculating 2*2, but I bet you knew that already :-).

The Unisys connection

Posted Mar 24, 2004 0:26 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Interesting, I had not known about the Unisys part. A quick search turned up this page (dated 1999) on where xv 3.20 is...and it all has to do with Unisys.

Of course, it would not have been that hard to release a version without GIF support and get on with life. A number of the other applications I looked at lack that support.

The Unisys connection

Posted Mar 24, 2004 0:35 UTC (Wed) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

And wasn't the patent only on the compression? I know there are supposedly
patent-free GIFs. If that is possible it seems like reading a GIF would not
be covered by the patent. So he would only have had to remove the GIF
writing support.

The Unisys connection

Posted Mar 24, 2004 7:32 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

If the LZW patents are the only problem, the xv author should soon be able to tell Unisys to get lost. According to the footnote at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html:

We were able to search the patent databases of the USA, Canada, Japan, and the European Union. The Unisys patent expired on 20 June 2003 in the USA, but it does not expire in most of Europe until 18 June 2004, in Japan until 20 June 2004 and in Canada until 7 July 2004. The U.S. IBM patent expires 11 August 2006, (we are still searching the databases of other countries).

So if he could assume IBM to not immediately take Unisys's place (obviously asking them first would be prudent), he could release xv 3.20 after 7 July 2004, if he is still interested.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

Posted Mar 24, 2004 9:11 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Mosfet's Pixie is really nice -- I used it for a long time. Unfortunately,
Mosfet has dropped his domain, let his website disappear and generally
dropped out of the picture. And some time ago, in a misguided attempt at
cleaning up my ~/src directory, I removed the source for Pixie, so I lost
it.

His MosfetPaint has never been released -- which is a pity, because I
would have liked to peek at the source to see whether I could snaffle bits
for Krita.