🚀 go-pugleaf

Don't worry about Unisys until they single out someone to sue.  Just
ignore them, until then, and then scream bloody murder if they pick on
anyone.  Three additional points:

1. Can you enforce a patent after the piggies are out of the barn?
There are probably more than a million sites with working binaries of
compress, and many derivative works, including most of the MS-DOS
archive programs.  I know that trademark and copyright law are
different, but LZW data compression has been quite effectively
genericized, kleenexed, and xeroxed.

2. The LZW method was described in an IEEE Computer article by Mr.
Welch, with no mention of patent restrictions on its use.  You'll note
in the compress source code that they cite this article.  What effect
on patent status does this sort of dissemination have?

3. The description of the algorithm in the article by Mr. Welch
contained a bug that prevented the program from working properly.
This was noticed by several parties (including myself) and corrected
in a letter to the editor a few months later.  Did they patent the
buggy version, or, if not, can they really patent something that is
not purely their invention?

I wrote a version of LZW compression (not nearly as complete as the
compress method) that I put in the public domain five years ago.  I'm
still getting calls from people who are using it in commercial
products, and I know that it is on one or another of the C user's
group disks.

Sue me Unisys, Sue me!!!


--
Kent Williams                    'Look, I can understand "teenage mutant ninja 
williams@umaxc.weeg.uiowa.edu    turtles", but I can't understand "mutually 
williams@herky.cs.uiowa.edu      recursive inline functions".' - Paul Chisholm