Re: Is anyone paying attention ???

[Thomas Mueller]

Ricsi> unisys has the legal patent of the LZW algorithm incorporated into GIF.
  Also it is legal to use GIFs, only the authors of programs have to pay
  licenses to unisys if their program can read/write or manipulate GIFs, and
  therefor needs the compression algorithm to be able to do this.

What about freeware graphics viewers and graphics manipulation programs, such as
Pictview for DOS and GIMP for Unix/X-Windows?  Would they exist if they had to
pay license fees for GIF?