Writer for GIF images
Original Reporter info from Mantis: dezlov
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Reporter name: Denis Kozlov
Original Reporter info from Mantis: dezlov
- Reporter name: Denis Kozlov
Description:
Currently there is no writing capability for GIF images. I presume the reason for this was the various patents around GIF images. However, it seems that all of the patents limiting the use of GIF files have expired. Sources of this information include "gnu.org" and "wikipedia.org". Links and extracts are in additional information section.
Reading of GIF images is implemented in TFPReaderGif class, part of "fcl-image" package. Could a writer be implement in a similar fashion? Or, should this be in Lazarus?
Additional information:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html :
There is no special patent threat to GIF format nowadays as far as we know; the patents that were used to attack GIF have expired. We were able to search the patent databases of the USA, Canada, Japan, and the European Union. The Unisys patent expired on 20 June 2003 in the USA, in Europe it expired on 18 June 2004, in Japan the patent expired on 20 June 2004 and in Canada it expired on 7 July 2004. The U.S. IBM patent expired 11 August 2006. The Software Freedom Law Center says that after 1 October 2006, there will be no significant patent claims interfering with the use of static GIFs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format :
The US LZW patent expired on 20 June 2003. The counterpart patents in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy expired on 18 June 2004, the Japanese counterpart patents expired on 20 June 2004 and the counterpart Canadian patent expired on 7 July 2004. Consequently, while Unisys has further patents and patent applications relating to improvements to the LZW technique, the GIF format may now be used freely.
Mantis conversion info:
- Mantis ID: 25476
- Version: 2.6.2
- Monitored by: » @onpok (Ondrej Pokorny), » dezlov (Denis Kozlov), » AntonK (Anton Kavalenka)