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From: Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>
Subject: Re: UNIX Compressed Files From A PC
Date: 2000/08/17
Message-ID: <8nh6fo$8kp$1@nnrp1.deja.com>#1/1
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References: <3995C90A.E72C055F@acm.org> <3996DCFB.22A75F67@acm.org>
 <3996D2DE.5E9BB6FE@netwood.net> <3997FF32.D2B43133@acm.org>
 <8ngpm8$tof$1@melusine.cuivre.fr.eu.org> <8ngto9$tge$1@nnrp1.deja.com>
 <8nh256$39g$1@wanadoo.fr>
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In article <8nh256$39g$1@wanadoo.fr>,
  "Jean-Pierre Rosen" <rosen.adalog@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>
> "Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> a �crit dans le message news:
8ngto9$tge$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
> > No. As I mentioned previously, you'll have a tough time finding free
> > solutions to his problem.
> You might be interested to read http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/lzw.html
> It describes how they circumvented the patent problem in Xpdf.

Short answer....by calling the Unix "uncompress" command in a
subprocess. Not too good of a solution if you want to make a Mac or
Windows version.

A further reading shows that the author isn't convinced that
decompression algorithms are allowed (which would make gzip illegal). As
if that weren't bad enough, he has a link to Unisys (
http://www.unisys.com/unisys/lzw/ ) where they claim that you need to
get a separate license from them to *use* any software anyone else wrote
that contains lzw, even if the author also had a license. They go on to
point out that GIF, Postscript, and PDF all use lzw. Yuk.

Of course Adobe has bribed...er..purchased the proper license for their
tools (http://www.adobe.com/support/salesdocs/f636.htm ). As the patent
issue prevents the creation of a free PDF tool, I dobut they are too
broken up over it.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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