Re: Warning to people working in fractals and chaos

Richard wrote:

Its easy to say that in hindsight with where open source is now. At
the time (1990/1991), open source wasn't nearly as big, the internet
wasn't being talked about in barber shops and it wasn't clear what was
going to dominate image compression. It turned out that everyone
adopted JPEG because there was a freely available quality open source
implementation.

Absolutely right.
If I remember correctly, Iterated Systems used to sell a hardware card to do
the compression stage at a fast speed. What were the chances of success
when jpeg could do it in software and pretty quickly too?
Another problem was that the compression ratios were (to my taste) somewhat
exaggerated.

Edmond Dantes wrote:
What Barnsley should have done was not bother with the
patent at all, but instead put focus on creating open source applications
based on the fractal compression and made money supporting those.

I am a fan of open source software, but it is still debatable whether it is
possible to make money when the thing you give away for free is your only
idea/product.

Remember how the PNG format came about when Unisys enforced the compression
in the GIF format?

It is simply not easy to make money on a patent these days.

Well, I think that it well depends on what the patent is about...

Regards,

-G-

.

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