Z:gnu-www-ja-stallman-mec-india--3ddbaf-First, let's consider avoiding/en

First, let's consider avoiding the patent. Well, in some cases that's easy. You know, Unisys was threatening people using the patent on LZW compression; we just had to find another data compression algorithm and we could avoid that patent. Well, that was somewhat difficult because there were many other patents covering lots of other data compression algorithms. But eventually we found one that was not in the area that those others' patents cover; eventually we did. So that program was implemented. It actually gave better compression results and so we now have GZIP, and a lot of people use GZIP. So, in that one case it was considerable work but we were able to do it, to avoid that patent.