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www/philosophy gif.html
From: |
John Sullivan |
Subject: |
www/philosophy gif.html |
Date: |
Tue, 08 Aug 2006 22:29:03 +0000 |
CVSROOT: /web/www
Module name: www
Changes by: John Sullivan <johnsu01> 06/08/08 22:29:03
Modified files:
philosophy : gif.html
Log message:
Change end date for GIF campaign as per advice from SFLC.
CVSWeb URLs:
http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/www/philosophy/gif.html?cvsroot=www&r1=1.29&r2=1.30
Patches:
Index: gif.html
===================================================================
RCS file: /web/www/www/philosophy/gif.html,v
retrieving revision 1.29
retrieving revision 1.30
diff -u -b -r1.29 -r1.30
--- gif.html 8 Aug 2006 22:26:43 -0000 1.29
+++ gif.html 8 Aug 2006 22:29:01 -0000 1.30
@@ -1,8 +1,343 @@
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
+ <head>
+ <title>Why There Are No GIF files on GNU Web Pages</title>
+ <meta http-equiv="content-type" content='text/html; charset=utf-8' />
+ <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/gnu.css" />
+ <link rev="made" href="mailto:address@hidden" />
+ </head>
+
+ <!-- This document is in XML, and xhtml 1.0 -->
+ <!-- Please make sure to properly nest your tags -->
+ <!-- and ensure that your final document validates -->
+ <!-- consistent with W3C xhtml 1.0 and CSS standards -->
+ <!-- See validator.w3.org -->
+
+ <body>
+ <p>
+ <a href="#translations">Translations</a> of this page
+ </p>
+ <h3>Why There Are No GIF files on GNU Web Pages</h3>
+ <p>
+ <a href="/graphics/philosophicalgnu.html"><img
src="/graphics/philosophical-gnu-sm.jpg" alt=" [image of a Philosophical Gnu] "
/></a>
+ </p>
+ <hr />
+
+ <p>
+ There are no GIFs on the GNU web site because of the patents (Unisys
+ and IBM) covering the LZW compression algorithm which is used in
+ making GIF files. These patents make it impossible to have free
+ software to generate proper GIFs. They also apply to the
+ <strong>compress</strong> program, which is why GNU does not use
+ it or its format.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Unisys and IBM both applied for patents in 1983. Unisys (and
+ perhaps IBM) applied for these patents in a number of countries.
+ Of the places whose patent databases we were able to search, the
+ latest expiration date seems to be 1 October 2006.
+ <a name="returnnote" href="#venuenote"><sup>1</sup></a> Until
+ then, anyone who releases a free program for making GIF files is
+ likely to be sued. We don't know any reason to think that the
+ patent owners would lose these lawsuits.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ If we released such a program, Unisys and IBM might think it wiser
+ (for public relations reasons) not to sue a charity like the FSF.
+ They could instead sue the users of the program, including the
+ companies who redistribute GNU software. We feel it would not be
+ responsible behavior for us to set up this situation.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ Many people think that Unisys has given permission for distributing
+ free software to make GIF format. Unfortunately that is not what
+ Unisys has actually done. Here is what Unisys actually said about
+ the matter in 1995:
+ </p>
+
+ <blockquote>
+ <p>
+ <strong>Unisys does not require licensing, or fees to be paid,
+ for non-commercial, non-profit GIF-based applications, including
+ those for use on the on-line services. Concerning developers of
+ software for the Internet network, the same principle applies.
+ Unisys will not pursue previous inadvertent infringement by developers
+ producing versions of software products for the Internet prior to
+ 1995. The company does not require licensing, or fees to be paid
+ for non-commercial, non-profit offerings on the Internet, including
+ "Freeware".</strong>
+ </p>
+ </blockquote>
+
+ <p>
+ Unfortunately, this doesn't permit
+ <a href="/philosophy/free-sw.html">free software</a>, only
+ <a href="/philosophy/categories.html#semi-freeSoftware">semi-free
+ software</a> which cannot be used in a free operating system such
+ as GNU. It also does not permit <em>at all</em> the use of LZW
+ for other purposes such as compression of files. This is why we
+ think it is still best to reject LZW, and switch to alternatives
+ such as <a href="/software/gzip/gzip.html">GNU zip</a> and PNG format.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ <a href="/philosophy/selling.html">Commercial redistribution of
+ free software</a> is very important, and we want the GNU system as
+ a whole to be redistributed commercially. This means we can't add
+ a GIF-generating program to GNU, not under the Unisys terms.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ The <a href="/fsf/fsf.html">Free Software Foundation</a> is a
+ non-commercial, non-profit organization, so strictly speaking the
+ income from our sales of <a href="http://order.fsf.org/">CD-ROMs</a>
+ is not "profit". Perhaps this means we could include a GIF
+ program on our CD-ROM and claim to be acting within the scope of
+ the Unisys permission--or perhaps not. But since we know that
+ other redistributors of GNU would be unable to include it, doing
+ this would not be very useful.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ Shortly after Unisys made its announcement, when the net in general
+ was reassured thinking that Unisys had given permission for free
+ GIF-generating software, we wrote to the Unisys legal department
+ asking for clarification of these issues. We did not receive a
+ response.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ Even if Unisys really did give permission for free software to
+ generate GIFs, we would still have to deal with the IBM patent.
+ Both the IBM and the Unisys patents cover the same "invention"--the
+ LZW compression algorithm. (This could reflect an error on the
+ part of the US Patent and Trademark Office, which is famous for
+ incompetence and poor judgment.)
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ Decoding GIFs is a different issue. The Unisys and IBM patents
+ are both written in such a way that they do not apply to a program
+ which can only uncompress LZW format and cannot compress. Therefore
+ we can and will include support for displaying GIF files in GNU
+ software.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ Given this situation, we could still include GIF files in our web
+ pages if we wanted to. Many other people would be happy to generate
+ them for us, and we would not be sued for having GIF files on our
+ server.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ But we feel that if we can't distribute the software to enable
+ people to generate GIF files properly, then we should not have
+ other people run such software for us. Besides, if we can't provide
+ software in GNU to generate GIF files, we have to recommend an
+ alternative. We ourselves should use the alternative that we
+ recommend.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ In 1999, Unisys had the following to say about the issue of their
+ patent:
+ </p>
+
+ <blockquote>
+ <p>
+ <strong>Unisys has frequently been asked whether a Unisys license
+ is required in order to use LZW software obtained by downloading
+ from the Internet or from other sources. The answer is simple. In
+ all cases, a written license agreement or statement signed by an
+ authorized Unisys representative is required from Unisys for all
+ use, sale or distribution of any software (including so-called
+ "freeware") and/or hardware providing LZW conversion capability
+ (for example, downloaded software). </strong>
+ </p>
+ </blockquote>
+
+ <p>
+ With this statement, Unisys is trying to take back what they said
+ in 1995 when they gave parts of the patent to the public. The
+ legality of such a move is questionable.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ A further issue is that the LZW patents--and software patents in
+ general--are an offense against the freedom of programmers generally,
+ and all programmers need to work together against software patents.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ So even if we could find a solution to enable the free software
+ community to generate GIFs, that isn't really a solution, not for
+ the problem as a whole. The solution is switching to another format
+ and not using GIF any more.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ Therefore, we don't use GIF, and we hope you won't use it either.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ It is possible to make non-compressed images that act like GIFs,
+ in that they work with programs that decode GIF format. This can
+ be done without infringing patents. These pseudo-GIFs are useful
+ for some purposes.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ It is also possible to create GIFs using a patent-free run length
+ encoding but this doesn't achieve the compression that one normally
+ expects in a GIF.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ We decided not to use these pseudo-GIFs on our web site because
+ they are not a satisfactory solution to the community's problem.
+ They work, but they are very large. What the web needs is a
+ patent-free compressed format, not large pseudo-GIFs.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ <a href="http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/index.html">PNG format</a>
+ is a patent-free compressed format. We hope it will become widely
+ supported; then we will use it. We do have
+ <a href="/graphics/graphics.html">PNG versions</a> of the images
+ on this server.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ For more information about the GIF patent problems, see
+ <a href="http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/Gif/Gif.html">the League
+ for Programming Freedom GIF page</a>. Through that page you can
+ find more information about the problem of software patents in
+ general.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ <a href="http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html">The browser
+ support page</a> lists browsers which are compatible with the PNG
+ format and comments on how well they support it.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ There's a library called
+
+
+ <a href="http://ca.geocities.com/libungif/">
+ libungif</a> that reads gif files and writes uncompressed gifs to
+ circumvent the Unisys patent.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ <a href="http://burnallgifs.org">http://burnallgifs.org</a> is a
+ website devoted to discouraging the use of GIF files on your website.
+ </p>
+
+ <hr />
+ <p> Footnote:
+ <br />
+ <a href="#returnnote" id="venuenote">1.</a> We were able to search the
+ patent databases of the USA, Canada, Japan, and the European Union. The
+ Unisys patent expired on 20 June 2003 in the USA, in Europe it
+ expired on 18 June 2004, in Japan the patent expired on 20 June
+ 2004 and in Canada it expired on 7 July 2004. The U.S. IBM
+ patent expires 11 August 2006, The Software Freedom Law Center says that
+ after 1 October 2006, there will be no significant patent claims
+ interfering with employment of the GIF format.</p>
+ <hr />
+
+ <h4><a href="/philosophy/philosophy.html">Other Texts to Read</a></h4>
+
+ <!-- All pages on the GNU web server should have the section about -->
+ <!-- verbatim copying. Please do NOT remove this without talking -->
+ <!-- with the webmasters first. -->
+ <!-- Please make sure the copyright date is consistent with the document
-->
+ <!-- and that it is like this "2001, 2002" not this "2001-2002." -->
+
+ <p style="font-size: 10pt;">
+ <a id="translations"></a>
+ <b>Translations of this page</b>:<br />
+
+ <!-- Please keep this list alphabetical, and in the original -->
+ <!-- language if possible, otherwise default to English -->
+ <!-- If you do not have it English, please comment what the -->
+ <!-- English is. If you add a new language here, please -->
+ <!-- advise address@hidden and add it to -->
+ <!-- - in /home/www/bin/nightly-vars either TAGSLANG or WEBLANG -->
+ <!-- - in /home/www/html/server/standards/README.translations.html -->
+ <!-- one of the lists under the section "Translations Underway" -->
+ <!-- - if there is a translation team, you also have to add an alias
-->
+ <!-- to mail.gnu.org:/com/mailer/aliases -->
+ <!-- Please also check you have the 2 letter language code right versus
-->
+ <!-- http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/ert/iso639.htm -->
+
+ [
+ <a href="/philosophy/gif.ca.html">Català</a> <!-- Catalan -->
+ | <a href="/philosophy/gif.html">English</a>
+ | <a href="/philosophy/gif.de.html">Deutsch</a> <!-- German -->
+ | <a href="/philosophy/gif.es.html">Español</a> <!-- Spanish -->
+ | <a href="/philosophy/gif.fr.html">Français</a> <!-- French -->
+
+ <!-- Japanese -->
+ | <a href="/philosophy/gif.ja.html">日本語</a>
+
+ | <a href="/philosophy/gif.ko.html">한국어</a><!--
Korean -->
+ | <a href="/philosophy/gif.pl.html">Polski</a> <!-- Polish -->
+ | <a href="/philosophy/gif.ro.html">Română</a> <!--
Romanian -->
+
+ <!-- Russian/Russkij -->
+ | <a
href="/philosophy/gif.ru.html">Русский</a>
+ | <a
href="/philosophy/gif.sr.html">Српски</a>
<!-- Serbian -->
+ ]
+ </p>
+ <div class="copyright">
+ <p>
+ Return to the <a href="/home.html">GNU Project home page</a>.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ Please send FSF & GNU inquiries to
+ <a href="mailto:address@hidden"><em>address@hidden</em></a>.
+ There are also <a href="/home.html#ContactInfo">other ways to
contact</a>
+ the FSF.
+ <br />
+ Please send broken links and other corrections (or suggestions) to
+ <a href="mailto:address@hidden"><em>address@hidden</em></a>.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ Please see the
+ <a href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
+ README</a> for information on coordinating and submitting
+ translations of this article.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 1999, 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
+ 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110, USA
+ <br />
+ Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is
+ permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is
+ preserved.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ Updated:
+ <!-- timestamp start -->
+ $Date: 2006/08/08 22:29:01 $ $Author: johnsu01 $
+ <!-- timestamp end -->
+ </p>
+ </div>
+=======
<head>
<title>Why There Are No GIF files on GNU Web Pages</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content='text/html; charset=utf-8' />
@@ -333,10 +668,9 @@
<p>
Updated:
<!-- timestamp start -->
- $Date: 2006/08/08 22:26:43 $ $Author: johnsu01 $
+ $Date: 2006/08/08 22:29:01 $ $Author: johnsu01 $
<!-- timestamp end -->
</p>
</div>
-
</body>
</html>