aks%anywhere@HUB.UCSB.EDU (Alan Stebbens) (03/23/91)
There was a recent submission to "comp.sources.unix" of a couple of public-domain, unpatented compression programs, called "yabba" and "whap". The first paragraph from the package is included below; it has been ported to *many* systems already. Alan Stebbens Submitted-by: Dan Bernstein <brnstnd@nyu.edu> Posting-number: Volume 24, Issue 73 Archive-name: yabbawhap/part01 [ The file PATENT gives a nice summary of the issues. --r$ ] yabba applies Y compression to its input; unyabba decompresses the result. whap applies AP compression to its input; unwhap decompresses the result. whap and unwhap run at about the same speed as UNIX compress and uncompress, which use LZW coding; yabba and unyabba are two to three times slower. AP and Y compression are typically 10-20% more effective than LZW compression in the same amount of memory. Y coding, unlike LZW coding and AP coding, is unpatented. It should be possible to use these programs on any reasonable C platform, though they were originally designed on a BSD UNIX system.