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Unisys Cracks The Whip
Posted by
jamie
on Wed Apr 19, 2000 12:51 AM
from the saw-it-coming dept.
from the saw-it-coming dept.
Their GIF patent expires in 2003, so Unisys is
getting while the getting's good, according to CNET.
They're not commenting on the record, but it seems they'll be kicking up their licensing fees. According to one source, they asked Accuweather for US$3.8million. Instead, AccuWeather forecasts switching to
PNG
next month (insert sound effect of
burning GIFs.)
Update: 04/19 09:44 by J : I just checked the bug log for Mozilla's lack of PNG alpha transparency (which has been registered and debated for over a year, and which I gather is the major factor standing between Mozilla and PNG compliance).
Three days ago, after a little tweaking, Greg Roelofs reported significant progress on the latest build:
http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngs-img-moz.html
It's gorgeous! Aside from the interlacing bug (bug 3195), it's the equal of MacIE 5.0. Well done, Tim and Pam! It's truly a lovely thing to behold. I look forward to seeing this bug closed out at last.
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Re:Silly (Score:2)
Feel free to switch to a different compression algorithm, or to use uncompressed GIFs. But don't compress your BAT files with Unisys LZW unless you've bought a license.
LZW - not just for GIFs (or breakfast) (Score:2)
It will be nice to see the LZW patent die once and for all in 2003. Celebration over the expiration of the RSA patent will probably be winding down about then
Re:Link to the patent itself (Score:2)
If anyone has any doubts about how long the life of software patents should be, read this patent; this is all obsolete.
However, it is a good argument for (a) writing new formats; (b) not writing their code in legalese.
Hmm. Sounds like a hash table to me... I wonder if there was any "prior art" for this claim, eh? Or does UNISYS own the patent on hash tables too, so they can sue my File Org. class....
<HUMOR>
See, that's the problem: since UNISYS insists on writing patents instead of software, their next-generation OS is going to be *really amazing*, but it's currently 3 billion lines of source, and loosely based on MULTICS Technology (MT):
</HUMOR>
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
Looks like they just screwed up then... (Score:2)
Seems like Unisys is charging way too much now and everybody is sick of it. I expect GIF to be phased out by major sites that actually have to purchase a license for it. Smaller sites will probably continue to use them just because they are unlikely to be noticed by Unisys. With Mozilla supporting png, and MSIE probably supporting it too (I have no idea what the status is on MSIE, does it support png already?), sites won't have to use the GIF format anymore and Unisys will have just priced itself out of the game for the remaining years of its patent.
"upgrading" (Score:2)
You're going to send me the extra memory and a faster processor to use the newer browser? And a patch to include the features removed from older broswers?
Netscape 4 or later is laughable on this machine. BUt even with enough memory and speed, I stick with netscape 3. It's much faster. It crashes less.
Furthermore, everything after netscape 3 and the last mosaic removes featrues I regularly use: auto-image loading by window (rather than all or nothing in a slow preferences setup), and the alt- sequence to go back pages.
I don't care about newer java and javascript. I have yet to see anyone do anything useful with either of these on a web page.
Even so, I'd rather see a slightly updated netscape 3 than the bloated successors. When mozilla runs on my machine I'll try it again. Until then, it's lynx with an occasional netscape3.
Re:Yes, upgrading (Score:2)
Let's put this simply: Netscape 3 doesn't suck *as bad* as later versions of netscape and IE. As I mentioned, I don't normally use it, nor opera; they're both too bloated. I use lynx for nearly everything. Once I reconfdigured for a light background and for . on a link to open it with another copy of lynx, I was set.
and "pentium head?" . . . This obsolete thing under my desk is the first pentium I've ever been around. And it doesn't seem able to keep up with my 486/50 laptop. I doubt it could match my powerbook 180, either, but since that hasn't been assembled for years . .
\troll{ob ebay-dork: anyone want to buy the pieces
ANd I won't get into your luxurious resources; those machines that come fully assembled, include keyboards and a crt output, cycle times under a microsecond, etc . .
hack, more of a curmudgeon than usual . . .
Re:Why GIF? (Score:2)
>5.x they removed "Redneck" language from the installation program.
>(I bitterly miss the opportunity to "emmalate three clickers" and
>"floormat" my hard disk... <sigh> those were the days... )
Well since RedHat is located in North Carolina,they most likely got tired of it after being exposed to it on a daily basis.
Re:Patents (Score:2)
--
Re:Please understand UniSys's position (Score:2)
Unisis did not invent and does not own GIF. They do hold the patent for LZW which was used in GIF and which was patented after being published in a journal with no notice of patent pending (legal but dubious). No action was taken for years until GIFs got popular, then actions were taken against commercial graphics programs, now individuals.
--
Re:Due Diligence? (Score:2)
Re:Why AccuWeather... (Score:3)
= )
Re:Why GIF? (Score:2)
Fast forward to today. In the computer business, things that work are never changed until something new comes along. There was such a huge infrastructure in gifs that other formats have taken a while to catch on. jpegs have been well implemented for a while now in most browsers, as have other image formats. It is only recently that UNISYS has started to see gold and is trying to enforce its patents. At first they were too meak and everybody blew them off, just like everybody blew them off when they tried to enforce the patent against compress(1). Well, they didn't completely blow them off, some people went out and wrote other, non-patented algorythms in what would become gzip(1). Now that the internet is more visible, it seems that they have desided to be more agressive in trying to milk money out of this cash cow. I predict that a new format will displace .gifs in the next few months/years. It may be a format we already have, or it may be a new one.
So that's why people still use .gif files. They've been around for ever, there are a zillion tools and they are about the best supported format in a wide range of browsers. Times will change.
Re:What about /. and GIFs? (Score:2)
Re:Because it's tiny (Score:2)
No mention of JPEG format?? (Score:2)
When I see pictures and photographs posted on web sites, they're usually in JPEG format. After all, illustration programs and photo-editing programs can output to
As for PNG graphics, the issue up till now is that older web browsers will not display them. Fortunately, Netscape Communicator 4.05 and later, Internet Explorer 4.0 and later, and the upcoming Opera 4.0 will display PNG graphics files with no problems.
Re:PNG support lacking (Score:3)
It's likely that Netscape 6.0 (the final release version) will have it, and I think Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows 95/98/NT4/2000 may have it also. IE 5.01 will display
PNG lacks animation (Score:2)
The fact is, the lack of animation in PNG is going to be the biggest obstacle to eliminating GIF. Browser support is no longer really a problem, as soon as Mozilla ships - as Microsoft provides enough PNG support to get by (though both have trouble with alpha right now, a sexy feature that gif never supported anyway). What to do? What we really should have done is be ready with MNG [mirror.ac.uk], the animated network graphics format, but it just didn't happen - I suppose it's still not ready, for some reason completely incomprehsible to me, and even if it were it's not supported in Mozilla (yet:) and certainly not in in IE.
What then to do? It's possible to use javascript to animate PNGs, but (1) not everybody surfs with Javascript enabled (2) that's not exactly a trivial change to make to a web page. Ideally we'd just want to replaces GIFs by equivalent PNGs but that's just not possible with animated GIFs.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, what to do??? I sure don't know the answer to this, but I know something needs to be done. Not only does Unisys suck with it's abusive royalty policy and sleazy submarine tactic, GIFs suck too: (1) only 256 colors (2) poor compression (3) very difficult to scale dynamically.
Suggestions?
--
Re:Why GIF? (Score:2)
Incorrect. I recall reading discussions about Unisys and GIF just like this one on local BBSes in the late 1980s. Go ask Adobe how long they've been licencing LZW from Unisys so that they can support the "open" GIF format -- my guess is that it's been at least 12 years, if not more.
--
Re:GIFs are Dying (Score:2)
I've noticed something... (Score:3)
Re:No mention of JPEG format?? (Score:2)
Opera [opera.com] has had PNG support since about version 3.50. The current stable version is 3.62, which has decent PNG support, and better CSS than Netscape 4.72.
Cause and Effect (Score:2)
Eventually, one must make a decision:
Should virtuosity determine popularity?
or
Should popularity determine virtuosity?
It looks like Malda has chosen the second option. I must admit, that makes it harder to respect him. Perhaps he has a reason for wanting the current "top" browsers on top? (Ownership in Microsoft and/or Netscape/AOL?) I have been using browsers with PNG support since 1995.
---
Re:why go to the trouble of complaining to Malda.. (Score:2)
The issue isn't old browsers; it's shitty browsers. Browsers have supported PNG for as long as PNG has existed.
Under conditions like that, it is not unreasonable to expect people to toss their defective browsers and either upgrade them or switch to another one. If your browser is new enough to support frames and Javascript 1.0, then there's no reason it shouldn't have PNG too. (Yes, PNG is really that old, and has been supported by some browsers for that long.)
---
Yes, upgrading (Score:2)
No, because you don't need them.
I currently run a web browser that includes full PNG support (including alpha transparency) on a 50 MHz processor. And it is fast. Back in '95 I ran a web browser that included partial (not full featured) PNG support, but it was a 25 MHz processor and 16 MB of RAM. So don't talk to me about hardware requirements, Pentiumhead! ;-)
PNG does not require a fast processor or a bloated browser. PNG only requires that the browser author be thoughtful enough to include it. In other words, it helps if you're not using a shitty browser made by people to whom quality doesn't matter.
This will probably explain things better, so I'll spill the beans: I'm an Amiga zealot (and the browsers I refer to are Amiga Mosaic along with the PNG datatype in 1995, and AWeb in modern times). Whoa, whoa, take it easy -- put down the fireplace poker -- this Amiga zealot isn't going to make a scene. But now maybe that will help you understand what I meant by "upgrading." Hell no, I wasn't suggesting that you switch from Netscape 3 to Netscape 4. I am suggesting that you ditch the "big two" browsers altogether and go looking around at the fringe projects (Opera?), where you're likely to find much higher quality. That's upgrading.
Me too. I included the comment about Javascript to put it into a chronological context. If your web browser can do Javascript (even though everyone disables that "feature") then it is new enough to have no excuse for lacking PNG. Javascript is newer than PNG! That's why I can't help but smirk when you sing praises about Netscape 3. And my Amiga background just widens the smirk into a full-fledged grin when you bring up the topic of bloat.
---
Reminder: tool for making PNG from GIF (Score:4)
Re:Patents (Score:2)
Companies exist to maximize profit. That's the nature of the beast. People are motivated to acquire capital gains and other people are motivated to provide it. Without it, very little economy will exist. Unisys board members, chairman, and officers would all be subject to being kicked out by the stock holders (mostly institutional ones like banks, mutual funds, retirement plans, etc.) if they didn't make reasonable attempts to maximize returns. I suspect much heat has already been generated within the company for having failed to gain even better revenues on this in the past (especially for having been so ignorant about even knowing its potential in the 1980's).
The real culprit is a broken patent system. This broken patent system is responsible for every patent holder having to do the things they do, mostly because the opportunity exists. In theory, US patent law is supposed to maximize the public good through an appropriate body of laws. In practice it appears to be a drain on the economic flow, diverting huge funds into efforts, such as law suits, legal threats, and just plain negotiation, for massive numbers of trivial patents that are handed out almost as fast as AOL CDs.
The LZW patent is, perhaps, a poor example. I know how LZW works because I once wrote my own implementation of it from scratch from nothing more than Terry Welch's paper. In hindsight it might seem obvious, but at the time it was issued, I don't think it was all that much obvious.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands or even tens of thousands, of other patents that are at least trivial, and perhaps downright phoney. Those are the patents that need to be used as examples to show that the patent system is currently practiced in a way that contradicts the national good. Patents should be reserved as a reasonable reward and profitable return for those who do put in the effort and investment to bring intellectual wealth to the nation (trade secret being an available mechanism for those who prefer not to divulge their results). There should be a genuine and beneficial gain from that invention that is likely not to have been for some time later than when it was invented. Most of the patents issued today in the US benefit only intellectual property lawyers and allow large and/or monopolistic companies to bully smaller businesses (who, incidentally, are also trying to maximize their own returns on investment no different than any other business).
Focus. This is political. The change that needs to take place is a revision of the patent law. A proper patent law in the US will reduce lawsuits, increase sharing, and make legitimate and genuine patented ideas available to all for a fair and just reward to the inventors.
Re:/. Hypocrites? (Score:2)
PNG = "Please No GIFs"
Re:off topic, but... (Score:2)
Re:.GIF Does Support More Than 256 Colors (Score:2)
The examples are here [ipal.org]. And, yes, the file sizes, especially when not compressed due to no LZW, get huge. This is not the best way to do true-color imaging, but if it needs to be done, it can be.
Re:Delay payment :) (Score:2)
Re:Unisys, gif, png, etc. (Score:2)
An agreement on how to interpret such file by Microsoft, Netscape, and Opera Software, when displaying them via web browsers, as well as by Adobe and The GIMP development team in Photoshop and The GIMP for importing purposes, suggests to me that there is a prevailing concensus that the pallette change opinion has lost out to the full color rendering opinion. Remember that neither interpretation was ever standardized by the GIF89A specification. But the defacto standard seems to be clear. Even those programs that do not apply the full color method still don't do the pallette change method either. In fact I haven't seen any such program, ever. While I will stipulate that people certainly can interpret it to mean a pallette change, I have no doubt that today the prevailing intrepretation will be the one that is actually useful for something.
Re:Please understand UniSys's position (Score:2)
The creation of an uncompressed GIF does not imply the requirement of the LZW algorithm to uncompress it. The opening of the file is irrelevant to whether actually creating an uncompressed GIF is or is not using compression. The fact that you can open the file without LZW code allows the creation to be legal since it can be used entirely without any LZW implementation. The creator is not responsible for how the viewer opens it. You could open it with a text editor or a hex dump program, for all I care. Not using LZW is not using LZW, plain and simple. If you choose to use it on your end, that's your business.
Re:Unisys, gif, png, etc. (Score:3)
No, it does not restrict you to 256 colors. That limit came about back when the best graphical displays were 256 colors and indexed, and happened to match up exactly with the number of colors GIF could encode in a single image block. So the practice came about to use exactly one image block for a whole GIF image. There is nothing preventing you from using multiple image blocks (without the animation extension which isn't part of the official GIF standard). IE 3-5, NS 3-4, Opera, and Mozilla all display things correctly (IE fails to print correctly).
There are plenty of reasons not to use GIF, but a limit of 256 colors is not one of them. Such limits exist only in those programs (the majority, unfortunately) that implemented GIF by reusing tired old code over and over from the 256 color display days (e.g. 1989).
You can see non-compressed and true-color GIFs here [ipal.org] and get free GPL non-LZW code to produce your own here [ipal.org].
Why AccuWeather... (Score:5)
It just dawned on me. Unisys [unisys.com] and AccuWeather [accuweather.com] are competing providers of weather data, such as value added weather radar feeds. So my suspicion is that this may be more than just trying to get huge royalties. It may also be to try and cripple a competitor. I didn't see any mention of this in the CNET article [cnet.com], but I think it's important enough to bring up. It may even be relevant and further show why so many patents are really bad tools to put in the hands of business. It could help explain why they wanted so much from AccuWeather [accuweather.com].
PNG has no animation support (Score:2)
Nope. You're thinking of the wrong thing. PNG doesn't multi-images. Take a look at the PNG web site's intro page [cdrom.com]. It says:
You want animations, you want MNG. Of course, animations should go away completely and totally for all time, but that's just my opinion...
-B
What about /. and GIFs? (Score:5)
GIFs from the front page:
http://images.slashdot.org/title.gif
http://images.slashdot.org/greendot.gif
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicmozilla.
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topichumor.gi
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicprivacy.
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicbe.gif
etc...
--
GroundAndPound.com [groundandpound.com] News and info for martial artists of all styles.
Re:Patents (Score:3)
I disagree. PNG is at least as easy to implement as GIF or JPEG with the libpng [acid.org] library. It is available as source, compiles out of the box for just about any platform. The license is very unrestrictive -- similar to the BSD license.
GIF won't die without an animation replacement (Score:3)
The only way to really let GIF die (IMHO) is to create a free MNG library that can be easily included everywhere (like libpng) and put it into all free or semi-free browsers like Netscape, kfm, whatever. Once web site creators start using it, users will ask for MNG support (Ma, the animation doesn't display!) and IE will have it as well. Best thing would be a free GIMP-like animation editor...
Unisys is evil (Score:5)
As my library is freely available and the entire project is non-profit, I figured I might be able to get a license at no cost, as the Unisys page on LZW implies this is possible. So I e-mail off my license request. They send me back a questionaire about the nature of my software. I fill out and send it back. They e-mail me back, saying yeah we can license it to you for a fee, just tell us where to fax the forms. I reiterate the non-profit nature of my software and ask just how much the licensing fee actually is. They e-mail back 5000$, and that a) they can't license it to me anyway as they are only allowed to license to companies, not individuals and b) that users of my library, in order to be legal, would also need to license their use of LZW seperately (most likely for another 5000$).
So there you have it. Unisys is evil and this damn patent nonsense must stop.
Re:PNG support lacking (Score:3)
1) A squid (or other www proxy) plugin that converts all pngs it encounters to uncompressed gifs on the fly, allowing all browsers to see the images, but also allowing web developers to start using pngs now without worrying. Once browsers catch up, the new plugin can be deleted.
2) A squid plugin that converts all gifs to pngs. Meaning nobody will be able to see any images and pressure will increase on the browser developers to improve png support.
Okay, so point 2 wasn't serious, but point 1 _could_ help if enough people did it.
The LZW algorithm (Score:3)
LZW is a general purpose adaptive compression algorithm that can achieve the information theoretic maximum compression for a suitable source. It is based on LZ78 by Lempel and Ziv (IEEE trans. on inf. theory in -78) and modified by Welch (IEEE computer, sometime in the 80's)
The basic idea is to keep an indexed dictionary of strings seen so far (initially contains the alphabet) and then encode the index of the longest string that can be found in the dictionary starting from the current position. Then a new string consisting of the found string and the first unknown symbol (ie. not a suffix to the string) is inserted into the dictionary. So it is basically a method of replacing a string with a single symbol which references the dictionary (thus the name dictionary methods for LZ77 and LZ78). There are a number of modifications to this algorithm, for instance freezing the dictionary and flushing it at certain intervals... in practice the strings could be stored in a trie (you read right: a trie, not tree, but trie is a kind of tree).
LZW is old, nowadays people should use arithmetic coding (which is nearly information theoretically optimal in practice). IMO arithmetic coding and statistical modeling is the way to go. Basically you've got the best engine room possible (arithmetic coding) and then the problem is to add the intelligence (statistical modeling). BTW from what I gather arithmetic coding is also patented, but I don't give a fsck since I live in Europe... AC is pretty old, but it is based on an unpublished work by Elias... so finding prior art might be possible.
Re:Why GIF? (Score:3)
The point he was trying to make is a) it's damn near impossible to break into the PC OS market and b) just because something is free of cost doesn't mean it's going to immediately smother the other expensive options.
#include <std_freebeer_freespeech.h>
PS. Okay, yeah, we all know the zillions of places you can buy computers with Linux installed, or FreeBSD or some multi-boot variation. But he wasn't talking to
PPS. Of course, the real enemy is NS and MS for putting piss-poor PNG support in their browsers. If they had done it right back when PNG was introduced, or at least in the 4.0 browsers when they had no excuse but their own laziness, and Unisys had already been making a fuss about the patent, so everyone knew that GIF was a dead-end. Not to mention the nerve-grating limitations of GIF. And you'd think that, in the heat of the "browser wars" someone would point out how much of a selling point full PNG support could be. But NOOOOO, It was more important to have fancy animated buttons! And adding all these ridiculous panes so we could all browse in a tiny window with an effective size of a postage stamp, which is entirely filled with an ugly, flashing, patented, animated GIF! AAARRRGGHHH!!!!
But then, maybe we should encourage Unisys. All those banner ad mongers will find that it's no longer cost-effective to pollute our screens with their bloated, garish, animated crap. Unisys could license all the banner ads off of the internet. Woo-Hoo!
(off to take my medicine)
PNG support lacking (Score:5)
I don't think support for PNGs will become a priority for browser vendors until enough sites use them, but until the browser support is there, all those sites are potentially disfigured. There's no way I can tell a client I'm going to use an image format that might mess up their webpage. It's a catch-22, and browser developers are the ones best situated to get out of it. All that to say, PNG support needs to made a priority now.
As far as "political" considerations go, using GIFs has always been a little distasteful, but it wasn't as big an issue as it is now. Now that Unisys is pressing the issue, it't time to leave the GIF format behind.
Re:Patents (Score:5)
GIF is pretty simple to implement (compared to JPEG or PNG at least). So if Unisys doesn't bother enforcing the patent at first, a lot of people will pick GIF as their standard format. Then, once everyone is using GIF, and no one could even think of not supporting it, they jack up the prices.
The moral of the story: patent law needs to be amended so that you must enforce it, or lose it. You shouldn't be allowed to hide the patent until you can extort a fortune from everybody and his brother who implemented what they assumed was a free algorithm.
Incidentally, it may be possible to generate GIFs without using LZW. Supposedly, you can create a run length encoded file without using LZW that will magically get decompressed correctly by an LZW decoder. It depends on the scope of the patent.
If you used a licensed program (program that paid unisys' licensing fee, I mean, not "non-pirated") to create the GIF, you are fine. I assume accuweather is creating GIFs on the fly from a CGI script.
--Kevin
Due Diligence? (Score:3)
What I question is whether exercising this patent really does constitute due diligence. Especially exercising it the way they are now, asking $3,000,000 fees. Strikes me that there's more publicity advantage to being The Makers of the Graphic Format That The Whole Internet Uses, (akin to Cisco's "90% of the internet runs on the systems of one company, Cisco Systems" ads) than there is financial advantage gained by charging these fees.
Just my random $0.02CDN.
Johnath
Good (Score:4)
Re:Unisys is evil (Score:5)
I've heard that the resulting GIF files are a bit larger than usual, but it beats paying $5K.
Don't mention it, or it'll take longer (Score:4)
I get a nice flamey email about once a week from some ass who calls me a hypocrite and slams me for not getting out a new release. My usual response is to tell them that I delay replacing GIFs with PNGs by 24 hours each time someone asks me when I'm going to do it. They'll be replaced when they're finished. And if you ask me again I'll postpone it again.
(the original quote is here [slashdot.org])
OT: What exactly does Unisys do these days? (Score:3)
Please understand UniSys's position (Score:4)
Yu Suzuki