Re: [AD] GIF patent / support

[Elias Pschernig <allefant@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 4 Oct 2004 11:49:08 -0400, Chris La Mantia
<celamantia@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Maybe the question should be changed into: Why can't allegro read
> > GIF/PNG/JPG/MP3/TTF/AVI files?
> 
> Because the answer isn't the same for all these formats.

Well, I was thinking of an answer like "Because you can use an addon." :)

> 
> > > Besides, PNG is better.
> 
> This, I believe, is the crux of the matter.  Supporting GIF and not
> supporting PNG would be politically abhorrent to the Linux-advocacy comunity
> that is taking over Allegro.
> 

Nah, that has nothing to do with it for sure - else why do we support
BMP and not XPM? And PNG doesn't even support animation, so it will
never replace GIF on websites. Only not-animated pictures just make
not much sense for a website (so you have to use GIF, and why then
also use PNG), and for photos you have JPG.

> I still believe that Allegro should natively support at least one image
> format common on the Internet, and of the three most common, GIF is the
> least problematic: it's a tiny bit of code compared to PNG or JPG and is no
> longer under patent.  It's unfortunate that GIF comes with political
> baggage, and even more unfortunate that we bow to it.  I mean, why on earth
> do we support LBM instead of GIF?  When was the last time you loaded an LBM
> file?
> 

I agree, LBM (and also PCX) support should be in addons. And as was
said the last time we talked about this on this list I think - GIF
animations would be hard to support with the current load_bitmap API