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Re: wikidata dir added to htdocs

On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 12:04:32AM +0000, Joseph S. Myers wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Jan 2005, Andrew Pinski wrote:
> 
> > Should the GIF restriction be lifted? The patent has expired now.
> 
> Changes to <http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html> are a matter 
> for maintainers@gnu.org, even after patent expiration.  
> <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html> mentions one patent with an 
> expiration date of 11 August 2006.

However, the IBM patent in question has never been enforced against GIF
and is of questionable validity (given its duplication of the Unisys
patent); if free software wants to try to avoid even unenforced or highly
questionable patents we might as well quit now, because you almost can't
write programs at all.

Nevertheless, the FSF hasn't changed the policy on GIFs yet.
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