Use of gifs now requires a minimum $5000.00 royalty!

Recently, Unisys escalated their unreasonable behavior regarding GIF images and announced that any web site whatsoever, even not-for-profit personal hobbiest web pages like this one, would have to pay a minimum of a $5000.00 license fee for the privilege of having images on the site that are in the GIF format. Here is the official announcement from Unisys. (Unisys links updated 02/02/2000)

A brief history.

In the early 80's Compuserve Inc. introduced a format for storing graphical images which they called "GIF", for Graphical Interchange Format. Compuserve not only permitted, they encouraged this format to be used freely for the exchange and storage of images. This free usage became ingrained in the computing industry as an almost universally used format for exchanging and storing images on a computer.

The GIF format incorporated a run-length compression algorithm called LZW (for Lempel-Ziv-Welsh, after it's three inventors). Wang corporation held a patent on the LZW algorithm. When Compuserve introduced GIF in the early 80's, Wang officially stated that they accepted the free usage of GIF and would not attempt to collect any royalties arising out of its use, even though the LZW algorithm was embedded in the algorithm used to create GIF images.

In the early 90's Wang was purchased by Unisys. In the mid to late nineties, the World Wide Web was becoming quite extensive, and the overwhelming favorite format used for storing the images that appear on web pages was GIF. The greedy lawyers at Unisys saw serious dollar signs. They realized that the LZW patent that they had inherited from Wang gave them the right to demand a royalty for every single GIF image on the World Wide Web and, of course, there were millions of them!

In the latest bombshell to come from Unisys regarding this issue, they have announced that they intend to extract a minimum of a $5000.00 royalty from every web site, even tiny hobbiest ones, that use the GIF format on any of the images on the site. They are doing this in spite of Wang's promise not to do so! It seems that greed has trumped honesty and integrity.

As a result, you will find no GIF images on my site.

Alternatives to GIF.

Probably the most obvious alternative to GIF is Jpeg, which is freely available and does not have any royalty problems. Jpeg is, in fact, a much superior format for the storage and display of photograph images in that it's lossy compression allows them to be compressed to a much smaller size than a comparable quality GIF.

However, some images look very bad as a Jpeg. Line art images, for example, look lousy in jpeg format, with each line having a fuzzy halo around it. GIF is ideal for such images.

Another alternative to GIF is the PNG format. PNG is an open format that has been written in response to Unisys' behavior regarding GIF.

The unfortunate thing is that PNG is not widely supported by lots of browsers. The newer versions of Netscape Communicator for Windows and for Linux support it fairly well, but support in Internet Explorer is non-existent to extremely buggy, depending on the precise version. Furthermore, I have read that PNG is not supported on any browser for the McIntosh, not even Netscape.

As a result, I have chosen to use Jpeg for all my images on this site, even those for which it doesn't look very good. If and when the PNG format gains more support, I will convert the lineart images on this site to PNG.

Take a look at these examples:

Here is a jpeg representation of a lineart image:

Note the fuzzies around all the lines.

Now, here is the same image in PNG format:

If you cannot see it, your browser does not properly support PNG.

PNG images of lineart drawings are often smaller in size than the same image in GIF format, and almost always significantly smaller than the same image in Jpeg! (Photographs, on the other hand, are almost always smallest when stored as a Jpeg.)

I urge all of you to write to the maker of your favorite browser and urge them to support full and robust handling of the PNG format!

Thanks!

Links.

Here are some links to pages about this issue:

A page from the League of Programming Freedom on the subject.
The Burn All Gifs homepage.
The Free Software Foundation's take on the issue.
Unisys' position.

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