Message-ID: Pine.SO4.4.05.9911301958470.9345-100000@scooby.simplesystems.org
To: Izumi Ohzawa <izumi@pinoko.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Re: libtiff 3.5.3 release.
From: Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us>
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 1999 21:15:36 -0600 (CST)
cc: tiff@olympiakos.com
In-Reply-To: <199911302253.OAA07994@moica.berkeley.edu>
Sender: owner-tiff@olympiakos.com


On Tue, 30 Nov 1999, Izumi Ohzawa wrote:
> Xpdf (PDF viewer) author goes to the trouble of not using LZW
> decompression in Xpdf itself, but exec's system's "uncompress" to
> do the decompression.  I believe he must have been a target of
> "Unisys patent enforcement."

I am not aware of any open source author being sued (or even
contacted) by Unisys regarding LZW in the sources.  Removal of LZW in
the open source community was first driven by the philosophies of
Richard Stallman and the FSF and led to the creation of gzip, zlib,
and libpng.  Most recently Unisys has expanded their demands on their
web site to mention open source software and web sites.  This has
resulted in web sites switching to PNG, and additional open source
packages removing support for LZW compression.

Does anyone know for a fact that an open source author has been
threatened by Unisys's laywers?

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen


