On Sun, Dec 12, 1999 at 11:56:57PM +0100, Eduardo Perez wrote: > [...] > > > If it becomes widely used, I'm sure someone will be willing to risk > > being sued (as I have with TIFF implementation) and provide an > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > Could you talk a bit more about that, please? Who and why sued you? Perhaps that paragraph doesn't make it clear. I've never been sued by Unisys (or anyone else) but it seems clear from e-mail communication with them that they considered plug-ins like Gimp TIFF to be in violation of their LZW patent, regardless of how LZW is implemented inside the plug-in. In theoretical terms, I do not know what legal precedents exist in the US or in my home country (Great Britain) so I cannot say whether a court would consider the violation mine, libtiff's or both... In practise, as I have said elsewhere off list, it doesn't matter. If they haven't done more than write unfriendly e-mail in the past I see no reason to expect different in the future. Bringing cases to court would only highlight the unfairness of algorithm patents, which is not in their interest. This isn't really on-topic for gimp-devel, so I suggest you take any further discussion off the list. From the graphics point of view, adequate or even better replacements for LZW TIFF already exist. Nick.
