Re: [MacPerl-Porters] GD

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 11.19 -0400 1999.07.16, Arved_37@chebucto.ns.ca wrote:
>Quoting Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>:
>
>> I've looked more into it, and it appears to me that the issue is LZW
>> compression, which gd1.5 uses and gd1.3 does not.  GD.pm uses gd1.2, and I
>> don't know what kind of compression it uses.  Boutell was concerned about
>> possible legal problems even with the RLE encoding in gd1.3 (saying that
>> there might be a problem using something that LZW decompressors can
>> decompress), but I don't see that as a reasonable legal issue.
>>
>> So the question, to me, is whether or not gd1.2 uses RLE or LZW, and what
>> the author of GD.pm is going to do.
>>
>Surprised he hasn't looked at other compression techniques. Flate, for
>example.
>
>Anyhow, if this is going to be an issue (and the Unisys patent on LZW has
>been a problem for quite a while; hence the PNG format), maybe we should
>consider porting/building something else. ImageMagick? Most of it (the
>manipulation stuff) works just fine on MacOS. That way we provide more
>capability than just GIF, also.
>
>What do you think?

I have no problem with that, but I think we need to retain GD.  Lots of
people use it for lots of things.

--
Chris Nandor          mailto:pudge@pobox.com         http://pudge.net/
%PGPKey = ('B76E72AD', [1024, '0824090B CE73CA10  1FF77F13 8180B6B6'])

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