Re: [Fractdev] June 20th is Gif expiration day!

Lee wrote:

I hope that everyone here knows what happens on June 20, 2003.

That's when US patent 4,558,302 expires. (That is the patent that Unisys has on the LZW compression algorithm that is used in gifs.)

The expiration of this patent has no effect on Fractint at all. We didn't implement PNG because of memory limitations involving the medium model and Fractint's large size. PNG is a superior format to GIF in almost every respect. For one thing, PNG supports true color and GIF does not. That's just the beginning. Howver, for 256 color images, GIF has been just fine. The DOS fractint will always keep GIF. On other platforms we can support PNG, and maybe also GIF if anyone cares. I know you care for backwards compatability. Tim