Re: [AD] GIF patent / support

[Chris <kcat@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris La Mantia wrote:
> - PNG: PNG is dependent on two external libraries, each of which have
> licenses incompatible with Allegro.

AFAIK, the latter statement is incorrect, and I'm trying to think of a 
way to make linpng/zlib optional run-time dependancies for the former 
statement.

> - JPG: Again, the code necessary to decode JPG files has a license that is
> incompatible with Allegro.

What is JPEGs license? I assume you mean patent, since we could just 
write our own code with our own license.

> - GIF: We could add GIF, but we just don't like it, so we won't.  GIF files
> are limited to 256 colors, and animated GIFs cannot be displayed directly
> using Allegro's BITMAP system.

GIF files are not limited to 256 colors. There was a link posted in 
allegro.cc's forums about that a while ago, but I can't remember it 
off-hand. The problem is that most GIF writers don't take advantage of 
some facet of the format, and thus limit themselves to 256 colors. And 
I'm not sure if any of the GIF loaders for Allegro are aware of this either.

- Kitty Cat