2004.01.14 22:40 "Re: [Tiff] http://www.libtiff.org/", by Joris Van Damme

However, I'm not sure how smart it is to discuss this case in public.

I understand this to probably be correct, so I will weight my words here. Allthough that will not be easy, I hardly speak any English.

Adobe... Sam... Someone at one time made a remark about TIFF being a green-eyed stepchild...

I feel mailing list members should stand up and take care of this. I don't know how, but that's what I was hoping could be discussed. Of course, you are right, it is not smart to discuss our options in public. But if we don't, how are we going to make sure action is taken at all?

Some people do more then their part serving the Tiff community, and we all appreciate their work. But appreciation is all they score. Noone can blame them if they choose to just ignore the problem, on the contrary, everyone is gratefull for the work they do already. So if we don't press this as a group, then how can we make sure anything is done about this at all?

I'm sure we all remember the storm caused by Unisys and co suddenly enforcing a patent on GIF. I mean, a community does have a certain power. Now what is GIF compared to TIFF? TIFF has been the number one professional image file format for over ten years. Ticoons like Marti Maria and Tom Lane and Pixar and Adobe people have contributed to the mailing list for years. I mean, LibTiff and this mailing list are monuments. But still it seems that anyone can quite simply hijack www.libtiff.org and nothing bad happens. So either we do something, or we got ourselves to blame for plain lazyness and should give up on our believes that communities make any sense at all. I fear that if we cease to discuss it in public at this stage, the latter will be true.

Joris Van Damme
info@awaresystems.be
http://www.awaresystems.be