In the Belly of the Beast
<p>In the beautiful-irony department, I have just learned that my name<br />
and copyright now appears in the EULA (End-User License Agreement) of<br />
a Microsoft product.  A vector-graphics editor called &#8220;Microsoft<br />
Expressions&#8221;, apparently &mdash; thanks to Martin Dawson for the<br />
tip.</p>
<p><center><img src='graphics/eric-in-eula.png'/></center></p>
<p>The history behind this is that GIFLIB is open-source software for<br />
hacking GIF images &mdash; the direct ancestor of libungif, which is<br />
the name under which the codebase is more widely known these days.<br />
The original software was by Gershon Elber for DOS; around 1987 I<br />
ported it to Unix, cleaned up the architecture, added numerous new<br />
features, and wrote documentation.  When Unisys started to jump salty<br />
about the GIF patents in the mid-1990s, I handed the project off to a<br />
maintainer outside U.S. jurisdiction, Toshio Kuratomi.</p>
<p>I have no idea why the copyright on this EULA is dated 1997, I<br />
think that is a couple of years after I passed the baton to Toshio<br />
Kuratomi.</p>
<p>Subsequently I did a lot of work on libpng, implementing 6 of the<br />
14 chunk types in the PNG standard and designing a new more<br />
object-oriented interface for that library.  So if you use open-source<br />
software that handles either of the two most popular raster-image<br />
formats, it is rather likely that you rely on my code every day. Yes,<br />
that includes all you Firefox and Netscape and Konq and Safari users<br />
out there.</p>
<p>And now, my code is in a Microsoft product.  This may not be the<br />
first time; in fact, thinking about all the other places it would<br />
have been silly for Microsoft to pass up using libpng and giflib,<br />
it probably isn&#8217;t even the dozenth time.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m OK with this, actually.  I write my code for anyone to use, and<br />
&#8216;anyone&#8217; includes evil megacorporate monopolists pretty much by<br />
definition.  I wouldn&#8217;t change those terms retroactively if I could,<br />
because I think empowering <em>everyone</em> is a far more powerful<br />
statement than empowering only those I agree with.  By doing so, I<br />
express my confidence that my ideas will win even when my opponents<br />
get the benefit of my code.</p>
<p>Besides&#8230;now, when Microsoft claims open source is inferior or not<br />
innovative enough or dangerous to incorporate in your products or<br />
whatever the FUD is this week, I get to laugh and point.  Hypocrites.<br />
Losers.  You have refuted yourselves.</p>
