| Re: GIF again..... [message #23173 is a reply to message #23077] |
Fri, 05 January 2001 17:23   |
Jeff Guerber
Messages: 41
Registered: July 2000
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Member |
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Dick,
xv's current home is http://www.trilon.com/xv/. I seem to recall
seeing something there (although I can't find it now) indicating that GIF
licensing is the reason there hasn't been a complete, new version of xv
since 3.10a in 1994! (I am not a lawyer, so I'll refrain from taking this
any further. Actually, I always thought that it was only _writing_ GIFs
that was illegal; but, as I said, IANAL.) We're looking into working
around the lack of GIF support in IDL by using PNG (which was developed by
the W3C itself) instead :-).
(The Web site does have a number of patches you can apply to the 3.10a
sources; my system manager recently rebuilt our copy with the patches, and
they seem to work great. Not that it helps for what you want to do.)
Usual disclamers apply: IANAL, I don't speak for NASA or Raytheon,
etc. etc.
Jeff Guerber
On Fri, 5 Jan 2001, Richard G. French wrote:
> After 5.4 came out, there were a lot of posts about the disappearance
> of the GIF writer and reader routines. Can any of you experts tell me
> about the legality of using shareware C code that reads and writes
> GIF files, originally used as part of the XV program that displays
> lots of image types on UNIX boxes? The idea would be to write
> wrapper routines that could call WriteGIF and ReadGIF in the XV
> code so that GIF writing and reading could be restored in IDL.
>
> These routines are in the pub/xv subdirectory of
> ftp.cis.upenn.edu
>
> If this is not legal, does it mean that XV is not legal,
> either, even if you pay the registration fee?
>
> Has anyone come up with a legal scheme under UNIX to
> read and write GIF files? If you have to pay a license fee, does
> anyone know what the fee would be for a single user?
> Thanks for any hints on workarounds.
> Dick French
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