Z:gnu-www-ja-danger-of-software-patents--71a174-On the other hand, a patent on/en

On the other hand, a patent on an algorithm may be impossible to avoid. Consider the LZW data compression algorithm. Well, as I explained, we found a better data compression algorithm, and everybody who wanted to compress files switched to the program gzip which used the better algorithm. And the reason is, if you just want to compress the file and uncompress it later, you can tell people to use this program to uncompress it; then you can use any program with any algorithm, and you only care how well it works.