Freenet makes one "political" point, that communication between people
should be unrestricted
I was hoping to have made the point that unrestricted communication *is* what we're talking about with the GIF patent issues.

> measures."  You either have it or you don't, and the patent issues mean
> that GIF *doesn't* have it.

Neither does Windows, in fact, neither does Sun's JVM.  Neither does the
BIOS on which Linux operates.  Without a pragmatic attitude towards
issues of IP, we would be paralyzed.
I agree. Pragmatically, giving support to the Windows platform is necessary. JVMs and BIOSes are irrelevant here. Freenet is not tied to any one necessarily. But, pragmatically speaking, PNGs and GIFs are both just as good as the other. They're both just as easy to use for the purpose at hand. It would be just as easy to use GIF as PNG. More importantly, it would be just as easy to use PNG as GIF, leaving only matters of principle to be considered. A consideration in which PNG wins.

> No matter how remote the possibility that
> these patent issues will affect the Freenet project (it's not true that
> encoders and decoders are the patent holders' only available targets) the
> political and ethical issues must be recognized.

Really?  So you wish to restrict the usefulness of Freenet based upon
one country's dumb laws?
Again, this isn't an issue of usefulness. The gateway page can be just as useful using the PNG format as with GIF, and that's the point.

-Todd


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