Re: Linux Kernel Source Compression

Olivier Galibert
2006-05-23T14:23:04Z

> just wanted to remark that I never liked that bzip was replaced by bzip2
> (were there license issues?) since bzip's compression was/is often
> stronger:

bzip1 uses arithmetic encoding which is heavily patented. bzip2 uses
huffman instead, which isn't, but is slightly (10% is often quoted)
less efficient. I guess bzip3 could use range coding which is
supposedly patent-free[1] and has similar compression ratio than
arithmetic coding.

OG.

[1] I guess everything is in the way it is written, since I have a
very hard time understand where the difference is between range coding
and arithmetic coding.