🚀 go-pugleaf

Al Lipscomb (arl@news.IntNet.net) wrote:
: Lets also look at Compuserve in all this. They could have elected to bear
: the cost of the license themselves. They are after all the ones who
: brought the GIF format to its present status. When Microsoft lost the
: Stacker litigation they did not pass the cost on to their customers (and
: I do not like Microsoft). Compuserve could have purchased a license for
: all applications using the LZW algorithum in relation to the GIF
: specification. They instead elected to pass the cost on.

That's odd, I thought for sure what I had seen from Unisys implied that
they were looking for a royalty for every unit sold. How does CompuServe
find out how many copies of every program that compresses or decompresses
Gif files are sold. (Add to that they are going to also have to track the
selling price, since it seems Unisys is dealing with the greater of a
flat fee and a percentage of the selling price.)
Could you honestly say that if you were in charge of CompuServe, that you
would pay royalties to Unisys for AOL's and Prodigy's use of the GIF
standard? As the head of CompuServe, you freely made available a standard
that all these people made money off of (since Unisys is aparantly not
going to charge licensing fees for freeware). While using this standard
they paid you no fees even though they profited, and now that Unisys
wants licensing fees your going to pay for everyone else? Why do I find
that unbelievable?