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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Ralf Muschall wrote:

> 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 ?
>

No, not really. The patent is in the algorithm mainly just for creating GIF images.
Nothing applies to using the data (created images). Although, Unisys' legal/marketing
departments might have liked you to believe otherwise.

Oh, and MSIE has supported PNG since version 4.0, and Netscape since 4.x also (both
for well over a year now, I seem to recall). Opera has for even longer.

BTW, you really should upgrade your browser ;-)

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Jon A. Cruz wrote in message <37253808.4C95543E@geocities.com>...
>Oh, and MSIE has supported PNG since version 4.0, and Netscape since 4.x
also (both
>for well over a year now, I seem to recall). Opera has for even longer.


If you use IE4, don't be put off by the fact that drag-dropping a .PNG file
on it elicits just no capabable message: if you write a tiny web page in
which you include an <IMG > tag with the approriate .PNG file name, IE4
displays it without a hitch. Maybe it's just a bug in the drag&drop code.
Netscape 4.5 accepts both the HTML and the drag/drop actions without
problem.

To my knowledge, GIF is free to read but patented to write. Anyway, having
PNG gives us a much better and free alternative but for the anymations. By
the way, PNG is now codified and an RFC.

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