However, since the revoking of the Unisys license, it has informally stood for "Graphics Draw".

Support for drawing GIFs was dropped in 1999 when Unisys revoked the royalty-free license granted to non-commercial software projects for the LZW compression method used by GIFs.

When the Unisys patent expired worldwide on July 7, 2004, GIF support was subsequently re-enabled.

GD scripts can thus be written in potentially any language and run using this tool.

GD supports numerous programming languages including C, PHP, Perl, Python, OCaml, Tcl, Lua, Pascal, GNU Octave, Rexx, Ruby and Go.