> And it is only free for baseline ( Whatever that means ) To be fair, the same was true of the original JPEG when it was released. JPEG also has an optional a

> And it is only free for baseline ( Whatever that means ) To be fair, the same was true of the original JPEG when it was released. JPEG also has an optional arithmetic coder based on IBM's Q-coder, which was heavily patented at the time. To this day, no one implements that, even though it does improve the compression and even though IBM's patents have long expired.