Z:gnu-www-ja-software-patents--9d433a-I figured I better take a look/en

I figured I better take a look at this patent. I got a copy and it turned out to cover the program that we were just a week away from releasing. That program died before it was born. Later on we did find another algorithm which was un-patented. That became the program  gzip, which is now effectively the de-facto standard for data compression. As an algorithm to use in a program for data compression, it was fine. Anyone who wanted to do data compression could use gzip instead of compress. But the same patented LZW compression algorithm was also used in image formats such as the GIF format.