[NTLUG:Discuss] Re: [svlug] EVENT: Burn All GIFs Day.

[cbbrowne@godel.brownes.org]

On Tue, 31 Aug 1999 23:06:13 CDT, the world broke into rejoicing as
Chris Cox <cjcox at acm.org>  said:
> The good news is there are other LZ (not LZW) derivatives which are as good
> if not better than LZW and therefore don't come under this copyright.
> Gzip comes to mind.
> 
> Compress uses LZ....I don't think it uses LZW (?).

No, don't think so...

I was involved, back in the late '80s, with a code review for ncompress,
a "relatively libre" alternative to AT&T compress.

I suggest looking at:
<http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/misc/ncompress-4.2.3/LZW.INFO> which is
pretty salient to the current discussion.

Note that the particular article was posted on gnu.misc.discuss in
1990, and I'd suggest that people consider the fact that this is *very*
old news as a suitable perspective for the Unisys goings-on...
--
"Barf, what is all this prissy pedantry?  Groups, modules, rings, ufds,
patent-office algebra.  Barf!"  -- R. William Gosper
cbbrowne at hex.net- <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>