GIF Support Returns to GD

g_adams27 writes "Legions of geeks and developers owe a debt of gratitude to Tom Boutell and his "gd" library, which powers the drawing and graphic-generating tools used by dozens of open-source projects. And now, with the expiration of the last Unisys patent on the GIF format, support for GIFs has finally been reinserted in gd. The GIF/PNG/MNG wars may continue, but having more options is good!"

Did anyone really stop using gifs?

[Neil Blender]

I know I didn't.

Unisys

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet nobody in Unisys (at least nobody high up) even knew about this happening ... otherwise they would have realized they weren't making money in the last year and put it in the public domain and made a press release etc.

Shows you that a corporation like Unisys isn't dynamic. RSA on the other hand, was making money off their patent and decided that there's value in releasing it into the public domain prior to the patent expiration date.

Gif is only good for animation

[wheany]

The only thing gif does better than png is animation. Okay, on some rare occasions, gif compresses better. But most of the time, you have no reason to use gif instead of png.

What format war?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Can you show me a mainstream, modern browser that doesn't understand both GIF and PNG?

Answer to the inevitable PNG Slashbots

[IGnatius T Foobar]

The usual crowd of nincompoop Slashbots are going to crow "They should just leave it out! Everyone should use PNG anyway!!"

Let me answer that in advance by reminding everyone that GIF is a useful format. Everything can read it and display it. It's been around for two decades and is now a completely open and unencumbered standard.

And let's not forget that when you need to display an image that is non-lossy, and supports transparency, and displays properly in Internet Explorer (shame on you for using Internet Explorer in the first place, but we'll accept that a lot of people still do) ... GIF is still the only available option.

Re:Answer to the inevitable PNG Slashbots

[Anonymous Coward]

when you need to display an image that is non-lossy, and supports transparency, and displays properly in Internet Explorer

We'll ignore the fact that GIF is limited to 256 color non-lossyness, but which of those does 8-bit PNG not meet? It's just as non-lossy as GIF, it supports single bit transparency (just like GIF), and it displays properly in IE. Now, IE has trouble with 24bit color PNG with transparency, but that's not something GIF is capable of.

Re:Did anyone really stop using gifs?

[ron_ivi]

Only those people with no respect for intellectual property rights kept using them.

I find it interestingly ironic that most commercial software disrespected IP-rights by continuing to include GIFs, while the open source community showed far more respect for intellectual property law by going through great effort to avoid violating such patents.

Re:Gif is only good for animation

[rjamestaylor]

Beta was and is better than VHS. Anyone understanding video would choose Beta over VHS. Millions of average people began buying VHS machines because they were cheap. Millions more began buying VHS machines because they would play other people's tapes. Beta, the superior technology, lost to the cheaper, "good enough" VHS because of market adoption. Internet Explorer has and will always have GIF support. Its PNG support is less than optimal. Got something you want everyong to see? Use GIF.

Re:Did anyone really stop using gifs?

[Tumbleweed]

For 'many' of the uses? Hardly. If you save a PNG as 24-bit, even though it has 8-bit or fewer colours, even pngcrush (or the better such program, pngout) can't help much. Saving a PNG properly, THEN using pngout will almost always produce a smaller filesize than GIF. It's _exceedingly_ rare that you'd have a smaller GIF - usually only when you're using a 1 pixel transparent GIF for a web site spacer graphic, which you _should_ know how to avoid doing by now, anyway, if you're anything resembling a well-informed web developer.

Bah. A pox on GIFs!

Now if only Adobe could get off their lazy crappy-programmer asses and put proper PNG compression in Photoshop so we wouldn't _need_ programs like pngcrush & pngout.

Re:IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the poster was trying to ask whether congresscritters can make a similar law and grant Unisys control again.

So the question is .. can the IP "rights" transfer back into Unisys hands at a later date if Congress so decides.

It appears to me the answer is yes (thanks to cooperation of the supreme court).

Re:Seeking legal advice

[Kphrak]

It's YRO not because GIFs could violate your rights online, but because Unisys, the holder of a submarine patent on GIFs, could. That's one of the main reasons we switched to PNG. Now the patent expired, meaning our rights to use GIFs, without getting the pants sued off us, are back.

Please increase your clue level before posting. The article is correctly filed.

Re:Digital Cams ?

[rusty0101]

I would suspect that camera developers chose JPG because it was a specification from the Joint Photographers Group (hence it's name). If you are going to sell something to photographers, you want to tie it to a standard that photographers are expected to approve of.

Note, I am not saying that it was the best standard to choose, simply that it made sense from a camera developer's standpoint.

I doubt seriously that GIF will be a standard for camra developers to select and store to.

I susect that for the forseable future, uncompressed images will be saved to TIFFs, and compressed (lossy) will be stored as JPG files. How long this status will stay, I can't predict, neither can I predict what standards will take over.

-Rusty

Wrong

[adiposity]

Unless you know the business internals and license agreements of those companies, you have no idea whether they respected the patents or not. However, all major graphics program vendors (Adobe, JASC, etc.) have LICENSED the gif compression algorithm, and used it in their programs. Those who paid to use those programs have the right to create gifs.

These commercial softwares did not disrespect "IP-rights," they meticulously followed the law by doing exactly what's required to use the patented algorithm. They showed respect for the patent by paying to use the algorithm. Free software respected the same rights by not using what they hadn't paid to use (because they either couldn't or weren't willing to).

-Dan

Re:Did anyone really stop using gifs?

[Pieroxy]

The problem is not user error. I use Photoshop and ImageReady for my icons/pictures processing purposes. I have very rarely encoutered an icon that would be smaller with PNG. So I still stick to GIF for most purposes.

Now maybe the PNG compresor is a piece of crap in IR. How am I supposed to know? I'm not going to try 100 different compressors.

A format that has no decent popular implementation will fail. No matter how good it is. This is a MAJOR problem for PNG. And it is not a user error.

Re:Yes, many of us really did stop using GIFs!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point, but there's only so much the software can do. It would be nice if it at least defaulted to 8-bit if the image had few enough colors. I don't know whether apps typically do this or not. I usually use Paint Shop Pro, which allows you to choose between several output options -- I never use the defaults.

Software should provide options, but most users will simply accept the defaults, so a format like PNG that has many options creates a bit of a problem. Who do we blame, though? Is it the user for not knowing enough about the format they are using? The software for not being smart enough? The format creators for not making it simpler? Obviously I was blaming the users in the grandparent post, and you are correct to point out that this isn't completely fair.

For the record, the main problem is people using the wrong type of PNG -- 24 bit when 8 bit is the one that's actually comparable to GIF. It's unlikely that a PNG optimization program will help much in that case (though maybe some of them will change the PNG mode if it can be done losslessly -- but I haven't seen this).

Re:Wrong

[scottj]

EXACTLY! My photoshop-created GIFs were not disrespecting any patents or laws. They were fully and completely licensed. That fact that the license for the GIF code wasn't free didn't make it any less legal. It was merely commercial software.

But now that it's returning to the public domain finally, I have found that I prefer PNG and its alpha transparency to GIFs. It seems that Unisys' actions provided an incentive to innovate rather than stifling creation.

Re:PHP

[scottj]

PHP is definitely not the only user of GD. Heck, GD is a C library. There are a lot of C apps out there that use it.

Personally, I've only used GD via perl and the many perl libraries that use it, primarily GD.pm [cpan.org].

Re:I may owe you an apology...

[femto]

You have just illustrated a shortcoming of proprietory software. MS (or predecessor) wrote a library, licensed it to Adobe and that is where it stayed.

*If* MS and Adobe were free software projects, Adobe would have gotten its simplified PNG library and had a product to market just as quickly. Another person could then have come along and at a later date and implemented the remaining filters. In this way Adobe gets a working product quickly, but at a later any missing features get filled in.

As it is the proprietory model delivered the fast product, but missed out on the 'incremental improvement' stage.