Re: Linux Kernel Source Compression

Jan Engelhardt
2006-05-25T11:43:08Z

>> 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.
>
Although plans for a bzip3 have been posted (I think removing the MTF and
so on...), it has not been done yet. Maybe I am wrong here.

Jan Engelhardt
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