This is great news. Although the patent has only expired in the US due to the 20 year rule, it will most certainly make it possible for Open Source products to start supporting GIF again without having to pay blood money to the patent holder.

Among the products that have already received patches are GD (Graphics library, used in PHP et. al).

[Via Pnut's Thoughts]

It might seem it isn't, based on my own experience and that of others, many times it can be a pain in the ass to deal with the many different implementations of RSS, it doesn't make it any easier that we have formats forumlated by different parties, and no real standard everyone agrees on.

As always, Virtuelvis has something wise to say about the whole process: Replacing RSS

As someone who simply wants to use some kind of syndication format, either for consumption or production, the neverending debate is confusing, and annoying. I don't give a rats ass about who invented or co-invented RSS. I don't want to read endless flamewars on whether someones RSS is funky or not, I just want something that works!

I would be happy if Userland (the makers of Radio), Six Apart (MovableType) and Google (Blogger) at least could sit down and pre-position a standard to W3C or IETF, or for that matter - any other standard body that would be acceptable to all parites. Everything is better than the chaos we have today.

And for the record. IMNSHO Dave Winer and Userland did not make it any easier when they decided to release RSS 2.0. In my eyes the release of RSS 2.0 was in part to satisfy someones ego, and in part to include support for new features in Radio. Nothing more, nothing less.