Jon A. Cruz wrote:

> But Unisys has long since changed their tune and have demanded royalties from
> even freeware programs. (They took the freeware exemption out of their license
> well over a year ago)
> Also, much of the free world is amazed by the silly concept of software patents,
> and thus their authors have no problem with the issues. Here in the States,
> though, the lawyers run free and are to be watched.

This would mean that essentially the whole WWW is illegal now - I have
yet to
come across a website without images, and AFAIK browsers do not support
PNG
yet. (And until MNG is defined, animations are impossible, too.)

How active have they been in raiding websites ?

To the original question: It might be helpful to unpack the sources
of netpbm or pbmplus, which has standardized interfaces for access
to various image formats. This would make the function call independent
of the file format.

Ralf

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