Re: [Phpgroupware-developers] The GIF issue

[Miles Lott]

To me the real issue is in who has control over the project.
This is our software, for the moment.  I have no interest in
bending over for these powers that would be over this or any
'ethical issue'.

If there were a real legal or technical problem then I could
understand worrying about it a bit.  Since there isn't, this
is only a strongarm attempt to have us exchange our own ethics
for someone else's so that we may remain under the umbrella
of protection that GNU can provide to shield us against large
corporations and other interests taking our code to do with as
they please... hmmm....

If you like our project enough to want to base GNU's
business operations on it, then accept it warts and all.
Perhaps we could fork the code.  Or, you could always fork
yourselves.

Bob Schader wrote:
> 
> Dan,
> 
> I will see if I can convert a gif file or two to the ungif format
> to compare sizes. Another possible solution I thought of
> would be to program PHP to generate all the images on the
> fly from some type of template, that could make changes based
> on the current themeset in use.
> Bob
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dan Kuykendall (Seek3r)" <address@hidden>
> To: <address@hidden>
> Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 12:20 PM
> Subject: Re: [Phpgroupware-developers] The GIF issue
> 
> Bob Schader wrote:
> >
> > 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.
> 
> Yes, the issue is in inlcuding gifs at all
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Interesting idea. Do you have time to find out what size diff we are
> talking about?
> 
> Seek3r
> 
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-- 

Miles Lott - http://milosch.net
phpGroupWare - http://www.phpgroupware.org