Z:gnu-www-ja-stallman-mec-india--f20df7-Well, since we in the GNU proj/en

Well, since we in the GNU project needed a data compression program and since we could not use Compress, we began looking for some other compression program. We found out about&hellip; Somebody came forward and said: &ldquo;I have been working on this algorithm for a year and now I have decided I am going to contribute it to you, and here is the code.&rdquo; We were a week away from releasing this program when I just happened to see a copy of the New York Times, which doesn't happen very often, and it just happened to have the weekly patents column and I noted it and so I read it. It said that somebody had got a patent for inventing a new method, a better method of data compression. Well, that was not in fact true.