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The GIF patents expired while Firefox was still in early development. And it was not the GIF format itself which was patented, but a particular compression algo
by jmillikin 17y ago
The GIF patents expired while Firefox was still in early development. And it was not the GIF format itself which was patented, but a particular compression algorithm used with it -- decoders, as used in Mozilla, were not patented.
People could (and did) create uncompressed GIFs to avoid the patent risk. For obvious reasons, uncompressed H.264 is not useful.
[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
- bcrescimanno 17y agoThe Mozilla appsuite was released as a 1.0 product in 2002 Firefox was released as a 1.0 product in 2004 The last GIF patents expired in 2006 (the first, in 2003 after the 1.0 version of the Mozilla App Suite)
- jmillikin 17y agoLooking further, there were no patents on GIF decoders (from < http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html >). So Mozilla was completely in the clear.
- kinetik 17y agoThere was only one patent, for LZW, but it was held in multiple countries. It first expired in 2003, and had expired in the last country by 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enforcement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Uni...
- vrode 17y agoWhat about Flash then?
- fungi 17y ago? what do you mean?