taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

I shaved my beard, and made an animated GIF of the process! Enjoy…

Tags: animation, beard, gif, images, shaving, silly

Software: Economist: Unix’s founding fathers (via sourcefrog.net). A very good article on Thompson, Kernighan and Ritchie’s amazing achievement, with some new details I hadn’t heard before:

AT&T was required under the terms of a 1958 court order in an antitrust case to license its non-telephone-related technology to anyone who asked. And so Unix and C were distributed, mostly to universities, for only a nominal fee. When one considers the ineptness of AT&T’s later attempts to commercialise Unix — after the court order ceased to be applicable because of another antitrust case which broke up AT&T in 1984 – this restriction, an accidental boost to what would later become known as the open-source movement, becomes even more crucial.

So that’s how that happened. Just think — if it wasn’t for that court case, we’d probably all be hacking on VMS. ;)

Also at sourcefrog, mbp points out that the Sulston reverse-engineering story is ‘remarkably similar to that of Richard Stallman several years earlier, when the frustration of closed-source printer software helped motivate him to start the GNU project’.

Patents: yet another sourcefrog link, this time to a CNet story with a hilarious quote regarding software patents and the GIF/PNG debacle:

But Unisys credited its exertion of the LZW patent with the creation of the PNG format, and whatever improvements the newer technology brought to bear.

‘We haven’t evaluated the new recommendation for PNG, and it remains to be seen whether the new version will have an effect on the use of GIF images,’ said Unisys representative Kristine Grow. ‘If so, the patent situation will have achieved its purpose, which is to advance technological innovation. So we applaud that.’

Wow. Presumably by the same logic, they applaud al-Qaeda for improving airline security innovation, too…

Tags: case, court, gif, order, png, software, sourcefrog, story, unisys, unix

Patents: I’ve just come across Tim Oren’s page on the Unisys GIF patent furore of 1994-5. Tim used to be VP of ‘Future Technology’ at CompuServe.

The GIF furore, in case you missed it, was one of the most far-ranging software patent debacles to date. Here’s what happened…

Compuserve was one of the biggest online services at the time. In 1987 they’d created GIF, an efficient image file format, for public use, with a very liberal license. As a result, everyone and their dog wrote software to read and write GIF files (including myself ;).

GIF, like many other tools of the time, used the LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) file compression scheme, which had been widely published without any indication that it was considered proprietary. LZW was pretty much the de-facto standard for file compression in the early 90s, in the same way that ‘gzip’ is nowadays.

However — 7 years later, in 1994, Unisys suddenly announced that they had filed for, and eventually received, a patent on the LZW algorithm. As Tim wrote at the time, this was a ’submarine’ patent. (Unisys had owned that patent since 1985, and pursued hardware licenses — but all and sundry believed that the patent didn’t cover software-only implementations.)

Unisys shook downbrought an infringement suit against Compuserve, who had published the GIF standard and implemented it widely in their software. Compuserve had ‘no recourse but to settle’.

(Interestingly, it appears that at the time, Unisys seemed to think that GIF decoders needed licenses as well — popular thinking nowadays is that only GIF encoders need licensing, but Unisys didn’t think so at that stage at least.)

There is a happy ending — thankfully, free software saved the day. ;)

As Tim writes, Thomas Boutell, Jean-loup Gailly and others came up with PNG; Jean-loup and Mark Adler wrote GZIP; and LZW was consigned to the dustbin of unusable technology for most new projects. Old projects, of course, had to go through some redesign pains to achieve the same goal.

BTW, it’s worth noting that, even though the Unisys patent has expired, it’s still not safe to dust off LZW. GNU (and others) believe that there’s another patent filed on the same algorithm independently by — guess who — IBM, which doesn’t expire until 11 August

1. The thoroughly-competent USPTO strikes again ;)

The lesson: be careful when implementing published standards. Nowadays, the IETF requires that contributors disclose ‘the existence of any proprietary or intellectual property rights in the contribution that are reasonably and personally known to the contributor’. But in this case, the patent was owned by another body, Unisys, and the contributor (CIS) didn’t know that, so that wouldn’t have helped.

So, the real lesson: Just Say No to software patents ;)

Tags: compuserve, file, furore, gif, lzw, patent, patents, software, technology, time, unisys

Fun: C just got her xmas present; a digital camera, the Sony DSC P10 to be exact. Results to right ;)

Good: Sony’s easy-to-use use of USB mass-storage and open formats (GIF, JPEG, and MPEG). pnmstitch.

Bad: having to upgrade my kernel to 2.4.23 to get the bloody thing mounted! (Of course, iPhoto recognised it right away.)

Tags: camera, dsc, fun, gif, jpeg, mpeg, pnmstitch, right, sony, usb, use