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Home - Linux - Gif Stuff

Unisys holds the patent for LZW till around June 2003. I'm not going to get into the issues surrounding this. But I did a little experimenting with different compressions inside gif.

My basic alg for RLE Gif:

	ch = getnext();
	if (lastch == ch) {
		go look in stringlist for substring....
		if (in stringlist) {
			substring += ch;
			continue;
			}
		else
			nomatch();
		}
	else
		nomatch();

nomatch()
{
output substring entry;
add to substring to stringlist...
lastch=substring=ch;
}

In addition Unisys doesn't hold a patent in Australia. From the Unisys site (here), the countries where they claim a patent (for LZW) are: US, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the UK.

Links:

• http://prtr-13.ucsc.edu/~badger/software/libungif/index.shtml - libungif
• gif-format-gif89a.txt gif89a spec.
• http://www.serverobjects.com/lzw.html - fella who tried to license lzw.
• http://cloanto.com/users/mcb/19950127giflzw.html
• http://www.libmng.com/pub/mng/mng.html "Ming" an alternative to animated gif's?
• http://www.burnallgifs.org/

Last Change: Monday, 10-Jan-2005 07:41:05 EST

Disclaimer

The information provided within these pages is provided AS IS, and without any warranty. Following these directions may (but not limited to) crash your computer, delete all the information on your hard disk, open up security holes or cause your house to burn down. I made these pages to provide some information about the setup that I have done, but I did not proofread it for correctness, and in most cases did not test it. There are commands in these pages that would definately delete or corrupt all the data on your computer (especially the dualboot section). In fact it happened to me.... So you are on your own!