parted web page

[pogo]

Greetings:

        I was just browsing the online docs for parted at 

 http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/manual/

when I saw the following line: "no gifs due to patent problems".
        The LZW patent (LZW is the compression algorithm used in GIFs) expired 
a few years back (the patent in question was issued in December of 1985 and 
patents only last 17 years) so its use in free (or otherwise) software is no 
longer a concern or a problem.
        I hope these links don't wrap:
 
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/20/0216233&mode=thread&tid=152&tid=155&tid=185&tid=99
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%5C'4,558,302%5C'.WKU.&OS=PN/4,558,302&RS=PN/4,558,302


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