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The Unisys connectionThe Unisys connectionPosted Mar 24, 2004 0:26 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1)In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers by vblum Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers 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.
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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 supposedlypatent-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.
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