{"id":285,"date":"2006-04-17T11:43:45","date_gmt":"2006-04-17T16:43:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=285"},"modified":"2006-04-17T11:44:11","modified_gmt":"2006-04-17T16:44:11","slug":"in-the-belly-of-the-beast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=285","title":{"rendered":"In the Belly of the Beast"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the beautiful-irony department, I have just learned that my name<br \/>\nand copyright now appears in the EULA (End-User License Agreement) of<br \/>\na Microsoft product.  A vector-graphics editor called &#8220;Microsoft<br \/>\nExpressions&#8221;, apparently &mdash; thanks to Martin Dawson for the<br \/>\ntip.<\/p>\n<p><center><img src='graphics\/eric-in-eula.png'\/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>The history behind this is that GIFLIB is open-source software for<br \/>\nhacking GIF images &mdash; the direct ancestor of libungif, which is<br \/>\nthe name under which the codebase is more widely known these days.<br \/>\nThe original software was by Gershon Elber for DOS; around 1987 I<br \/>\nported it to Unix, cleaned up the architecture, added numerous new<br \/>\nfeatures, and wrote documentation.  When Unisys started to jump salty<br \/>\nabout the GIF patents in the mid-1990s, I handed the project off to a<br \/>\nmaintainer outside U.S. jurisdiction, Toshio Kuratomi.<\/p>\n<p>I have no idea why the copyright on this EULA is dated 1997, I<br \/>\nthink that is a couple of years after I passed the baton to Toshio<br \/>\nKuratomi.<\/p>\n<p>Subsequently I did a lot of work on libpng, implementing 6 of the<br \/>\n14 chunk types in the PNG standard and designing a new more<br \/>\nobject-oriented interface for that library.  So if you use open-source<br \/>\nsoftware that handles either of the two most popular raster-image<br \/>\nformats, it is rather likely that you rely on my code every day. Yes,<br \/>\nthat includes all you Firefox and Netscape and Konq and Safari users<br \/>\nout there.<\/p>\n<p>And now, my code is in a Microsoft product.  This may not be the<br \/>\nfirst time; in fact, thinking about all the other places it would<br \/>\nhave been silly for Microsoft to pass up using libpng and giflib,<br \/>\nit probably isn&#8217;t even the dozenth time.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m OK with this, actually.  I write my code for anyone to use, and<br \/>\n&#8216;anyone&#8217; includes evil megacorporate monopolists pretty much by<br \/>\ndefinition.  I wouldn&#8217;t change those terms retroactively if I could,<br \/>\nbecause I think empowering <em>everyone<\/em> is a far more powerful<br \/>\nstatement than empowering only those I agree with.  By doing so, I<br \/>\nexpress my confidence that my ideas will win even when my opponents<br \/>\nget the benefit of my code.<\/p>\n<p>Besides&#8230;now, when Microsoft claims open source is inferior or not<br \/>\ninnovative enough or dangerous to incorporate in your products or<br \/>\nwhatever the FUD is this week, I get to laugh and point.  Hypocrites.<br \/>\nLosers.  You have refuted yourselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the beautiful-irony department, I have just learned that my name and copyright now appears in the EULA (End-User License Agreement) of a Microsoft product. A vector-graphics editor called &#8220;Microsoft Expressions&#8221;, apparently &mdash; thanks to Martin Dawson for the tip. The history behind this is that GIFLIB is open-source software for hacking GIF images &mdash;&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=285\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">In the Belly of the Beast<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}