giflib: everything old is new again
<p>In 1994 I handed off the maintainership of giflib, the open-source library used by pretty much everything in the universe that displays images for the single most widely used icon and image format on the World Wide Web, because patent issues made it unwise for the project to be run by someone in the U.S.  Now, eighteen years later, Toshio Kuratomi (the hacker who took it over then) has asked me to resume the lead. I have accepted his request.</p>
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<p>I don&#8217;t expect this to involve a lot of work.  The code is very mature and stable; I left it in good shape and it&#8217;s coming back to me in good shape. I asked to rejoin because I thought it would be a good idea to run some auditing tools on the code to check it for correctness, and polish it into more modern C if that&#8217;s needed.  Major changes seem highly unlikely.</p>
<p>Toshio has lost interest in the project, and was looking for someone to hand it to. Eighteen years is a long time, much longer than I myself spent on the project. He&#8217;s owed everyone&#8217;s thanks for his responsible stewardship of the code. </p>
