Hi all, Out of some.. 191 (UN members).. countries in the world, today Unisys holds a patent on LZW in 7 of them. After tomorrow, only in 6: Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan (http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/lzw/index.htm). How worried would people be if the 6 countries would have been: Djibouti, Marshall Islands, Tonga, Kiribati, Fiji, and Grenada. I guess nobody would care if some unfortunate citizens of those countries accidentally violated local laws by downloading something. What's my point? Never mind.
Anyway, I think I'll just maintain the patch for my uses and we'll see in 2004.. Unless Kiribati Patent Office happens to find the long lost Unisys patent application, and then the world is again held hostage.. Seriously, there are number of php mirror servers in those countries and maybe that is reason enough not to include gif compression in PHP. I would have hoped it to not be. Maybe --enable-lzw configuration flag which is not enabled by default would be enough? And uncompressed gif format is used if this is not enabled. Btw. I think even uncompressed (ungif) format is useful, as it still allows animations in browsers, and it is also ok where bandwidth is not a problem but cpu time is. Also complex images tend not to compress well anyway. Regards, Jaakko -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.iki.fi/hyvatti/ +358 40 5011222 echo 'movl $36,%eax;int $128;movl $0,%ebx;movl $1,%eax;int $128'|as -o/bin/sync -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
