Last Stacker patent expires May 14th

[Brett Glass]

Everyone:

The last of the Stac data compression patents, granted in 1991, 
expires on May 14th of this year. For a long time, all 
implementations of PPP for FreeBSD have had stubs for the Stac 
compression methods (in particular, MPPC; see, for example, 
/sys/netgraph/mppc.c) and there's now absolutely no reason for them 
to do so anymore. (Linux, in fact, has jumped the gun and has 
compression code available.) Shall we start coding?

--Brett Glass