Back in 1994 or so, I bought a book on digital image processing because I wanted to be able to save some of my fractal images in GIF format and needed to know how to write a GIF. I copied the C code out of that book and used it for many years. And then the internet came along. And so I put that code in a little free library that also assisted with JPG reading and writing and posted it to the internet.

Since then, based on that library my name has popped up in the credits for digital music players, big-name video games, and assorted on-line articles. Very cool. No, I don't use the f'ing GPL.

And today, I'm back into that GIF reading code, trying to figure out why it won't read a particular GIF I found on the internet. So, I've been looking at the code from GIF readers on the net, comparing what I do to what they do, trying to figure out what's going wrong. But I haven't figured it out yet because most of the GIF reading code I've found on the net seems to be derived the very code I posted way back when - either from what I posted, or from someone else who started with that same book. Big claim! How can I tell? Granted, there are a finite number of ways to write a GIF decoder, and they're all going to look alike on some fundamental level because the job isn't extremely complicated (though there are some tricky bits). But, you can tell. Some of the readers still have my name in the comments, for example. Others have been modified a bit and have dropped the credits, but might still retain the exact variable names from the code I posted; and some retain residuals of the quirky logic that that original code used. I'm sure I could put together a tree that shows all various branches and derivations of derivations from that original code. If there was a need. Which there isn't.

But, the bottom line is that I can't fix my GIF code because nearly everybody who posts GIF code is posting something based on, or derived from a derivation of, the code I posted to the internet twenty years ago - the code with the bug I can't find. Sigh.