Re: [Phpgroupware-developers] The GIF issue

[M. R. Brown]

* Bob Schader <address@hidden> on Thu, Jan 17, 2002:

> Dan,
> 
> I looked into this gif issue tonight, and found the following statement on
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html :
> 
> Decoding GIFs is a different issue. The Unisys and IBM patents are 
> both written in such a way that they do not apply to a program which 
> can only uncompress LZW format and cannot compress. Therefore we 
> can and will include support for displaying GIF files in GNU software.
> 
> So I guess I don't see what the problem is, except for the very act of
> providing the gifs in the first place. If this is the main issue, then we 
> could
> get around that by using GNU's own "libungif" to create gif files that
> are not compressed using LZW, if this would not cause a big bandwidth 
> problem. People could then have the option to re-optimize the
> uncompressed or pseudo gifs to their own prefernce. I personally do not see
> where this would violate any GNU standards, because of the above statement
> and GNU's own support of libungif.
> 

<unlurk>

It sounds like classic FSF doubletalk, unfortunately.  On one hand they
support decoding LZW GIFs in any GNU software that needs to, but they don't
support the freedom of the *developer* to use them with that software?  Why
include GIF support in the first place?  So if the GNU wrote (or co-opted) a
web browser or other rendering element that supported GIFs, would they
support decoding GIFs, but only allow the browser to go to non-GIF sites?

My advice to the phpGW project is to stick to your guns.  The FSF has a
history of turning simple technical issues into moral and political tirades
(or crusades, same thing).  I had long since subscribed to not using GIFs
at all on my webpages, but I had the recent misfortune to find out the hard
way that PNGs aren't supported properly by most browsers (Netscape 4.x
being the primary culprit).  So I had to reevaluate my stance, in order to
achieve the level of professionalism my users would expect.  I don't
understand why the FSF can't do the same.  This is a *technical* issue, why
can't it be kept that way?

It also seems like naivety came into play here as well.  What FSF website
even uses a clean, modern UI, one that would utilize transparent images?
Were they even aware of the technical challenges of not using GIFs for
transparency when philosophy/gifs.html was written?

Does the FSF propose fixing browsers with broken PNG support?  Wouldn't
that make a stronger statement than just a blanket ban of all GIFs?

Alas, even if phpGW's final option was to leave Savannah in order to
maintain the aesthetic excellence they have all this time, that wouldn't
prevent Savannah from co-opting phpGW's source and continuting to use it.
Just look at the SourceForge situation.  Unfortunately, if phpGW did leave,
I doubt the FSF would put a positive spin on it, and turn it into a
Slashdot-worthy debacle.

Even though Savannah proudly took SourceForge's codebase and implemented
it, what did Loic himself have to say about SourceForge and their paradigm
shift?  If you do leave for technical reasons, phpGW, prepare to be
dragged further into a non-techical debate - something that has little to
do with the thousands of lines of code (that the FSF haven't written, or
improved upon) and UI-element bytes that make phpGW as good as it is.

Yeah, it's a bit of a rant, but I couldn't buy into the BS that is FSF and
GNU software any longer.

Oh, of course, you could always pick the workaround solution, and make
phpGW more difficult to use and implement.

It's a good thing this whole stupid issue evaporates next year.

M. R.

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