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Old 06-13-2002, 09:09 AM   #31
SomeGuy
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Join Date: May 14, 2002
Location: Oklahoma, USA
Age: 33
Posts: 4,238
/)eath that picture of the erm uh mage/fighter is cool!Looks great!
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Old 06-13-2002, 08:12 PM   #32
/)eathKiller
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Join Date: January 5, 2002
Location: Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
Age: 38
Posts: 6,043
Thanks SomeGuy

magine that you are sitting down at your desk, staring at a sheet of paper, ready to create the next episode of your comic strip. You reach for your pen -- I'm assuming that you, unlike me, actually draw from time to time -- and the phone rings.

You pick up the phone. "Hello," a voice says. "We represent the Passaloosa Ink Company."

"So?"

"Well, we have information that leads us to believe that your inking pen uses Passaloosa Ink."

"Yeah, maybe it does. So what?"

"Well, you see, the company who made your pen never paid us for that ink, so you're gonna have to. That'll be $5,000.00, please. US, not Canadian."

Sound crazy? Well it hasn't happened yet, but it could. Only, it's not a pen, it's a graphics program. And it's not ink, it's a file format known far and wide across the internet as a "GIF."

Yes, the good old GIF. Small, fast, adequate for most comic strips (though the high-color ones already use JPEGs), and owned lock, stock, and barrel by a company that is all too eager to make money off it.

Fortunately, they haven't started charging individual web sites. Yet.

Once upon a time, there was a company named CompuServe. CompuServe, in its day, was sort of like America Online, only cool. CompuServe introduced this nifty graphics format called the GIF -- "Graphics Interchange Format." It was small, so it could be downloaded easily, and as long as you kept your graphic under 256 colors, you could make some nice-looking images in that small size.

And it was free.

To be more specific, if you wanted to use it, you didn't have to pay a licensing fee. You could put it in a graphics program without coughing up a yearly license, so people did. You could use the format in lots of different projects without lawyers knocking on your door shoving a bill in your face, so people did. In short, because no one was charging any money for it, people started to use it. And it caught on.

CompuServe made GIFs a de facto standard in online graphics. When the Internet exploded, GIFs followed, and by the time the World Wide Web was around, GIFs were the graphic format that you thought of first. Sure, you'd use a JPEG when you wanted to show something in thousands or millions of colors, but GIFs were what you did most of your work in. The GIF was the workhorse.

And then Unisys stepped in.

The Problem

As it turns out, GIF wasn't as free as we thought. GIFs use a very specific type of data compression to make files smaller. That type of data compression is called "LZW" ("Lempel-Ziv-Welch compression algorithm") -- and Unisys owns LZW.

The lovely thing about a patent is you can enforce it any time you want. You're not required to enforce a patent immeidately after discovering infringement, as you must with trademarks. No, you can choose your battles, and when you want to fight them... which is apparently what Unisys did.

No-one heard a peep from Unisys until GIFs had already become the de facto standard. Everyone was using them. People relied on them. Then Unisys came in and said, "pay us."

And it's not just GIFs! No, LZW is also used in TIFFs and PDFs. They've got their bases covered.

First, they only went after professional graphics applications, the kind you'd pay for in a department store. Programs like Adobe Photoshop, or Paintbrush, or things like that. Freeware applications (programs no-one had to pay any money to use) were specifically exempted from licensing fees by Unisys. So someone who created a program using LZW didn't have to pay any licensing fees -- as long as they gave their program away.

That changed, however. Unisys changed its mind down the road and said "no, freeware programs now have to be licensed as well." That kind of makes freeware graphics programs with GIF support an expensive endeavour, considering a license from Unisys cost about Five Thousand Dollars... US, not Canadian.

"But don't worry," Unisys promised, "we'll never go after individuals who use the GIFs, just the software programs that create them."

Well, they said something similar about Freeware programs... and they reserved the right to change their minds. Which they did, somewhat. If you are using a program that hasn't properly licensed the LZW algorithm, your work is not licensed and you must purchase a license on your own. That's where the phone call above comes in -- if Unisys decides that the pen company didn't pay for the ink, they'll make you pay for it, instead.

A Solution?

GIFs became popular because it made it easy for people to upload and download graphics over painfully slow modems. It was easy in a number of ways -- first, the file format was small enough to make such transfer feasible (much the same way an mp3 is small enough to make downloading music over the internet feasible). Second, it didn't cost anyone anything, so there was no financial overhead involved in using it. Now the second advantage was gone...

So someone created the PNG ("Portable Network Graphic") format. It was a replacement for static GIFs, with many of its limitations taken away. PNGs could be rendered in either 8 bits (256 color) or 24 bits (16 million colors). At 8 bits, a PNG could be smaller than a GIF if you had the right program. In fact, the only thing GIFs could do that PNGs couldn't was to create animations -- another file, "MNG," took care of that.

Unfortunately, PNGs were new, browsers didn't support them, and the consensus was "it's a good idea, but there's not enough momentum to start using it yet." So for a while, the PNG format languished in semi-obscurity, as something that could someday be used, but wasn't practical just yet.

Which brings us to...

The 21st Century

It's the year 2002. Every single modern browser supports the PNG format -- not completely, but well enough so that a PNG can be displayed on a web site. PNGs can be viewed via the web on Linux, OS/2, MacOS, Windows 9X, NT and 2K, BeOS and any other Unix platform that can actually fire up and run a web browser. PNGs are supported in Netscape 4.x, Internet Explorer 5 and higher, Opera, Netscape 6, and Mozilla. Of those five browsers, four can be downloaded and used free of charge. In other words, anyone who wants to view PNGs can.

The Point:

PNGS RULE! GIFS DROOL! and that Is why I never use Gifs in any of my sigs (unless they're animated), and that's why if you have Gifs for a website, you should convert while you still can otherwise you'll end up 5000 bucks in the hole! Or even worse.... in the big house...
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