GIF is finally free
Starting from October 1, 2006, the GIF graphics format has officially become a free format .
Although the last patent owned by IBM corporation expired on August 14 of this year, and patents of other companies expired several years earlier to finally “free”, the Graphics Interchange Format compression method took almost another month and a half. But now everyone can use the format for both commercial and personal purposes. By the way, restrictions on the use of GIF have led to the creation of an open PNG format based on the Deflate algorithm (GIF is based on LZW).
Although the last patent owned by IBM corporation expired on August 14 of this year, and patents of other companies expired several years earlier to finally “free”, the Graphics Interchange Format compression method took almost another month and a half. But now everyone can use the format for both commercial and personal purposes. By the way, restrictions on the use of GIF have led to the creation of an open PNG format based on the Deflate algorithm (GIF is based on LZW).
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/1850/
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