Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 25 Dec 1998 03:08:17 -0500 | From | Richard Stallman <> | Subject | Re: Article: IBM wants to "clean up the license" of Linux |
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The generic patent workaround: come up with something ever-so-slightly better and patent it.
Every patent covers a range of possible methods. Some patents are so general that it would be very hard for any variant which does the job not to be included.
Even when we do find an alternative method which is patent-free, sometimes that doesn't solve the practical problem--because of incompatibility problems.
In the 80s, compress was hit by software patents (LZW algorithm), and lost. The GNU project looked for someone to develop a free compression program with another algorithm. Our goal was a complete free Unix-like operating system, and that requires (among other things) a free compression program.
The first attempt to replace compress was hit by another software patent, one week before its planned release. So we found another person, Jean-Loup Gailly, who wrote the program that is now gzip.
The new algorithm was significantly better than compress--not a revolutionary advance, but enough for users to notice. gzip was quickly adopted for distribution of compressed tar files and for saving space on disk. However, the new algorithm has not succeeded at replacing LZW for compressing images. The WWW is still mostly using GIF format, which is based on LZW. PNG format, which uses the gzip algorithm, is used only rarely.
This is why www.gnu.org does not use GIFs--to remind people that the community needs to move away from that format. The net can still escape from the grip of the LZW patents, if the popular browsers can be made to support PNG.
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