A friend informs me that LZW is now out of patent. Is this true? If my memory serves, the whole debacle where Unisys claimed they deserved royalties on the GIF file format (am I remembering the company right?) was based on that patent.

I seem to recall that there were a lot of things that people weren't doing because of that. Things like software programs that wouldn't work with the GIF format because people objected to proprietary implementations, or couldn't afford to pay royalties, or whatever. So are we going to see new stuff come out now that works with GIF which didn't before?