Alistair said:
> There are implimentations of the GIF format which supports LZW-less
> compression using GIF compatible RLE encoding. This makes it possible to
> create GIFs without paying royalties to Unisys!
and the GIF freeware library I've got supports RLE encoding of GIFs. But
the issue is that I just want to be able to load any GIF files in that a
user may want to use.
As it stands it seems that the simplest approach is to not do GIF's and
tell the users that if they have GIFs to convert them into a BMP or JPEG
using some tool that has presumeably already paids its dues to Unisys.
Pretty stupid of Unisys as far as I can see. All that they have achieved
is to get people to use other formats, and other compression algorithms,
and as soon as 2004 rolls about and their patent runs out we'll just be
able to use it in any case. Given some of our customers reluctance to
upgrade their 286's I can see that by the time they are ready to upgrade
to our Windows software the patent will have run out and we can offer
GIFs!
Cheers, Max.
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