Re: 5.4

[mole6e23(at)hotmail.com (Todd Clements)]

>I personally guaranty you that if it would have been this trivial, it
>would still be there.  They put tools like IDL into a different category
>than utilities like Adobe where they do have very reasonable fees.

I guess I figured that there had to be a reason...that's partially why I
posted what I did, to see if I could flush that reason out. =)

>P.S.  You'll have a tough time blaming Kodak for this one.

I'm not blaming Kodak directly - the only "blame" I'm giving them is being
a big enough target for Unisys to care about. Unisys is the 'bad' company
here, and I'm completely aware of that - enforcement of a patent after
however many years and after it's really really popular is just a bad
idea.

However, I'm pretty sure that IDL 5.3 came out after the Unisys patent was
enforced, but it still supported the GIF/LZW compression schemes. How it
seems to a silly end user who doesn't know about these things in detail is
that as soon as Kodak owned RSI, the suport for GIF/LZW stopped, so a
correlation is implied. (And please, people, don't flame me for my
statistics on a single data point! ;-)

Todd