GIF is FREE

I remember when the first rumblings of this came about. It was in the early days of the internet that we know today. In those days of low bandwidth, the web was mostly just plain text. Images were starting to be imbedded into html. If you wanted a fast loading page with images you chose GIF. 28.8k was blazingly fast back then. It turned out that there was a patent on this file format. Some tech dinosaur company (UNISYS) CEO got the idea of “hey I can make money on the patent if I enforce it”.

Here is a link with the full article about the patent expiring.

This might be one of the earlier test cases where open source vs proprietary information clashed over usage on the internet. How things have changed in the past 10 years.