Unisys own U.S. Patent No. 4,555,302 and foreign counterparts covering the use of LZW compression and decompression technology which is used by the GIF file format. Programs which use LZW require a license from Unisys and may require royalties.
To avoid the need for you to acquire a license from Unisys to distribute a compiled executable, when InfoCourier compiles the executable it converts any GIF format files to an alternative format before it includes them. The executable you produce does not use LZW technology in any way.
Although InfoCourier converts the GIF format files to an alternative it will maintain transparency if the orginal GIF used it.
Because of this conversion process, compiling HTML that contains references to GIF files will be slower than those that contain PNG, BMP or JPG format graphics. However, display speed for the end-user is not significantly different.
The InfoCourier compiler itself, which of course needs to read GIF files in order to perform the conversion, is licensed under U.S. Patent No. 4,558,302 and foreign counterparts.
