Home » Patches

GIF Support in GD

Patches

These patches restore GIF support to various versions of GD.

Disclaimer

First let me state that this site is in no way supported or encouraged by the original author of GD.
His position on the LZW patent issue is clear from his actions.

Second, note that I do not in any way intend to contravene any applicable laws. It is my understanding that the LZW patent has not been registered in Australia, and that it is now too late to do so.
As a general rule Australia chooses to recognize copyrights of software, as
a way to protect original work. I also believe that rights to copy the gd software have been granted.

If you want to know my opinions on Patents and Copyright follow

this link.

If you have a legal opnion which indicates the above is incorrect, plase send mail to
libgd@rime.com.au, and we will make any necessary corrections.

We have no desire to infringe upon others rights under the law.

GD History

The original GD library allowed developers to manipulate GIF files. It was (and is) open source
freeware developed by Thomas Boutell of
Boutell.Com, Inc.

As you may or may not be aware, Unisys holds the patents on the LZW compression technology used in
GIF files. Despite the fact that they were made open and freely available for several years, and
as a result became a de-facto standard, in 1996 (I think) Unisys decided to enforce it's patent.

The result of this is that libraries like GD, which are open source, free development projects,
created, basically, out of the good nature of it's original author, could no longer use the
GIF format.

As a result, all support for GIF was removed in version 1.6 of the GD library.
This is the only correct solution for someone that lives in Canada or the US.

PHP

We are often asked how to build PHP (versions before 4.3) with GIF support.
While we have no direct experience of this, we did receive an
email describing the process.
It can be found here.

The process for building PHP 4.3+ with a patched GD seems to
be to use the --with-gd=<DIR> option. This will build PHP
using the external shared library. PHP is smart enough to check if the
library has GIF support.

GD Patches

The following links will take you to different flavours of the STABLE GD
2.0.26 library:

For those of you who use SuSE Linux and PHP, the RPMS for mod_php etc will be
forthcoming...

The following links will take you to different flavours of the OLD GD
2.0.21 library:

For those of you who use SuSE Linux and PHP, there are also RPMs for
mod_php etc at
http://downloads.rhyme.com.au/gd/suse.

The following links will take you to different flavours of the OLD GD
2.0.15 library:

The following links will take you to different flavours of the OLD GD 1.8.4 library:


I will endeavour to ensure that these files are up-to-date with respect to
the official version, but if for some reason you notice that they are out
of date, please send mail to libgd@rhyme.com.au.

Please report any problems with these versions to
libgd@rhyme.com.au.

You can also download the latest version of the standard libary from
the GD Home Page.

Finally, a local copy of the standard GD documentation can be found
here.

Older Versions

The following links will take you to different flavours of the OLD GD
2.0.12 library:

The following links will take you to different flavours of the OLD GD 2.0.11 library:

The following links will take you to different flavours of the OLD GD 2.0.7 library:

The following links will take you to different flavours of the current GD 1.8.3 library:

The following links will take you to different flavours of the current GD 1.8.1 library:

The following links will take you to different flavours of the current GD 1.7.3 library:

The following links will take you to different flavours of the current GD 1.6.3 library:

The following links will take you to different flavours of the revised GD 1.6.2 library
(this differs from the original 1.6.2 release in that a problem with the make file
was been addressed):

The following links will take you to different flavours of the
GD 1.6.2 library as originally released:

For all releases since the first release I have not bothered to reinstate LIBGIF support
since (1) I don't need it,
(2) More people download the internal support, and (3) the required patches are still not
applied to the standard LIBGIF library. If you really feel that you
need LIBGIF support, then send mail to

libgd@rhyme.com.au.

The following links will take you to patches for older versions of the GD library:

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