Macromedia follows Adobe in settling Forgent JPEG suit ... OSS developers shocked!

[Subway]

http://www.pdfzone.com/news/1602-PDFzone_news.html

Last week, Macromedia became the latest company to settle its differences out of court with Austin company Forgent Networks Inc., over the compression, storage, manipulation and transmission of still digital images in JPEG format.

First Adobe, then Sony (shame on them) and now Macromedia. If just PNG would be fully supported by all browsers.

Fredi

[johnie]

If it's cheaper to settle than to fight it out in court then most companies will settle. This is why the Patent system is so broken.

To defend from one of these cases you need about a Million or so in the bank to cover court costs, lawyers, ect. Plus if you fight there is still the chance you will lose. The courts are like a rolling the dice- You never "know" for sure what you will end up with.

[Subway]

And open source developers are screwed ... they invested countless hours in software that uses jpeg compression and now it looks like they have to throw that code away, especialy tools like Gimp and the PHP GD lib are soon ilegal or they have to remove jpeg support ... stupid patent system.

Fredi

[pooon]

What broswers don't support png? Do people still use such a thing?

[Subway]

Originally posted by pooon
What broswers don't support png? Do people still use such a thing?

IE (problem is how IE supports it ... ask my Smarty Smilies)

Anyway, that's actualy not the main issue I have with png only, fact is that jpeg can be really usefull, even with perfect png support.

Fredi