Burn All GIFs Day

NOV 05 1999 · 12:00

This is fine. House on fire. The patent protest spirit, illustrated by KC Green's dog half a decade later. Place: the open web · the FreeGIF coalition · Free Software Foundation backing Figures: Jeff Bryner, lead organizer · Bruce Perens, FSF support · the PNG working group Burn All GIFs Day is announced for 5 November 1999 by a coalition organized around the FreeGIF mailing list, with backing from the Free Software Foundation and the PNG (Portable Network Graphics) working group. The protest target: the Unisys LZW patent (see [[lzw-patent-1985]]) and the enforcement campaign Unisys began in 1994 (see [[unisys-enforcement-1994]] in Era II). Participating sites pledge to, on that one day, replace every GIF on their pages with a PNG and post an explanation of the patent thicket. The FSF posts a long technical brief. Slashdot covers the protest twice. Roughly several thousand sites participate, mostly small personal pages plus a handful of larger sites like the GNU project. Major commercial sites do not participate.