On October 1, according to The Software Freedom Law Center, "there will be no significant patent claims interfering with employment of the GIF format," ending years of uncertainty brought about by Unisysi announced intention to enforce its patent on the format.
Free Software Magazineis Tony Mobily noted: "I personally donit think that IBM (the holder of the last GIF patent) would ever sue anybody for using GIF, especially after investing several billion dollars on GNU/Linux and showing their declared friendliness towards free software (which would be directly affected by a law suit)."