Jonathan wrote:
> I don't think I've ever noticed a site actually using PNG -- I
> had to go away and look up what it was when it was first mentioned.
>
> GIFs are free for any non-commercial purpose, so most
> poplog users wouldn't be affected.
>
> I wonder if Unisys actually, really, truly charge anyone for
> commercial use? I decided to have a look at some commercial
> sites. Banks are about as commercial as I could think of, and
> the second one I tried, First Direct, had an animated gif on
> its home page. I wonder if they pay royalties to Unisys? There
> must be literally hundreds of thousands of small, commercial
> web sites using animated GIFs. Do they pay?
Sorry, what I said wasn't very clear. It's not really a royalty; more like a
licence fee. It's not the *use* of GIFs that requires payment to Unisys;
it's writing application code that produces or manipulates GIFs. For
example, Adobe have to pay in order that Photoshop can legally read and
write GIFs.
-- although, as Steve points out in his post, there's no such thing as an
animated PNG. (That will apparently have to wait until MNG is finalized.)
> >> I think the solution might be to emulate the kind of "plug-in" API
<snip>
> Both you and someone who e-mailed me privately misunderstood what
> I meant. So it must be my fault. I'll try again.
>
> I'm not suggesting that, with a small user-base, we can persuade
> lots of people to write plug-ins for poplog. What I was thinking,
> was that since the plug-in APIs for things like Netscape, Photoshop
> etc. must be known/obtainable, then if poplog provided the same
> API for plug-ins, we could piggy-back on the effort provided
> for those. For example, if poplog provided the same API as Adobe
> Photoshop, then presumably someone who had bought Kai's Power Tools,
> which are produced by a quite separate company, could also plug them
> into poplog, for image processing. (And ditto for shareware stuff.)
Now I see what you're getting at... Thanks for the clarification. (And yes,
that does sound like a good idea.)
Jason
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