ARTICLE - ESR gives up on Fedora

Jon 'maddog' Hall maddog at li.org
Fri Feb 23 11:29:36 EST 2007


Jerry,

> It is also interesting that the Huffman algorithm was published in a
> number of computer science books and was originally published in 1952. 

As you know, publication of the algorithm has nothing to do with the
protection of a patent as long as it was done after the patent was
taken.

Likewise, it may have been an improvement of the basic patent that was
the issue of the suit against Unix.  I do remember that the issue
happened in the time period of the early to mid eighties, so the
original patent should have expired by then.  The patent could also have
been "pending" for a long time, and finally granted at a much later
date.  The fact that it caused so much consternation tells me there was
an issue in a follow-on patent.

There was irony in the fact that the Lempel-Ziv Coding that was
implemented in compress(1) was more efficient than the Huffman Coding
used in pack(1) in a lot of simple cases.

Later an employee of Unisys also made changes to the Lempel-Ziv
algorithm and Unisys patented those changes.  This patented algorithm,
considered by many to be a minor improvement, became the basis of .gif
images, and we all know what happened there....don't we?

Ogg Vorbis, make it a lifestyle.

md




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