Z:gnu-www-ja-danger-of-software-patents--b0e116-Well, it's pretty obvious what/en

Well, it's pretty obvious what's going on&mdash;GIF was a de facto standard. In effect, asking people to switch to a different format, instead of their de facto standard, is like asking everyone in New Zealand to speak Hungarian. People will say, &ldquo;Well, yeah, I'll learn to speak it after everyone else does.&rdquo; And so we never succeeded in asking people to stop using GIF, even though one of those patent holders was going around to operators of web sites, threatening to sue them unless they could prove that all of the GIFs on the site were made with authorized, licensed software.