In a message dated 11/21/99 2:50:31 PM, you wrote:
<<I recently heard that some company bought the rights to the GIF format from
CompuServe and are going to start charging licensing fees to any web sites or
multimedia projects which use GIF files for the presentation of graphics. Is
that crazy, or what?
-- Downs>>
You got it a little mixed up. CompuServe made the GIF format, turns out,
some company owned the compression technology used in GIF, and didn't say so
until a few years ago. They started charging fees for the compression
technology, and everyone got very annoyed, but oh well.
The compression technology is LZW, an adaptive dictionary compression
that works by assigning a code word the the unique strings it's seen b4, and
therefore those unique strings can be replaced with one code-word.
I have an HC stack that employs LZW if anyone is interested.
