GIF Support Returns to GD 364
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
Unisys (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
What format war? (Score:2, Insightful)
Answer to the inevitable PNG Slashbots (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Re:Answer to the inevitable PNG Slashbots (Score:2, Insightful)
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? (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Did anyone really stop using gifs? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:1, Insightful)
So the question is
It appears to me the answer is yes (thanks to cooperation of the supreme court).
Re:Seeking legal advice (Score:4, Insightful)
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 ? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
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! (Score:1, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
*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.