VP3.com: Future VP3 Releases To Be LGPL

sudog writes: "According to this vorbis-dev posting and The VP3 Homepage VP3 (QT5-type movie compression scheme) is now under the LGPL! What's not clear is whether they intend to offer it guaranteed royalty and patent free to the community. They're actively looking for help, too. Does this mean that we no longer need the OGG-Tarkin to save us from our movie-less, video-app-less emulating?" Of course, they don't say starting when, exactly.

Comments

Looks like a good thing to me.

[noser]

I have never heard of this codec, but it seems to me that this is more or less what the LGPL is intended for. Take a quick look at the LGPL and note this section:

For example, on rare occasions, there may be a special need to encourage the widest possible use of a certain library, so that it becomes a de-facto standard. To achieve this, non-free programs must be allowed to use the library. A more frequent case is that a free library does the same job as widely used non-free libraries. In this case, there is little to gain by limiting the free library to free software only, so we use the Lesser General Public License.

(Emphasis mine)

Seems to me that the people at VP3 would like as many people as possible to start working with their codec, allowing it to gain ascendancy over other codecs so that someday they will be able to make money selling their own "enhanced" version. Not a bad deal for GNU, because we get something badly needed. I hope that we start to hear more about this codec being used in some interesting projects in the future now that it has become more available.

Re:I'd never trust anyone except Ogg

[JabberWokky]

DivX ;) has had a very bumpy and very forked road - primarily because it wasn't a file format so much as a hacked DLL that was a stolen Microsoft test codec, with the audio replaced with (originally) MP3. Since there was no formal definition of the file format, it's fragmented pretty heavily with different encoders producing output that works on some of the variants, and other encoders working on different variants. At least two efforts have been made to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, and at least two alternate sound codecs exist (thus the common cry of "there's no sound in that file!"). There are questions of patents being filed even now (since it was a "format" swiped from a corporation), and, all in all, the situation has been very tangled for a single, real standard to emerge.

LGPL grants the same public use that the GPL does, except you can also combine it with commercial software (you have to release source only for the modifications done to that specific part of the code). It's not a "bastard license", but rather a compromise to allow commercial software to link to fundimental system libraries and run on a Free system. YMMV on what you think of that, but for things like file formats and reference code to file formats, IMO, the LGPL is the best license around - it keeps the whole thing open, including any changes that anybody makes to it, so the standard is open for the whole world no matter who uses it in any application.

I'm personally of the opinion that an LGPL library to read a few types of XML documents (a word processor format, a spreadsheet format, a bitmap with annotations, a vector art format and a vector engineering format) should be made, and maintained by all major office suites, probably starting off with the various open source projects. Even if a company didn't use the exact code, it serves as reference code for compatability tests and extensions.

--
Evan

Re:ogg tarkin is somewhat dead.

[jonathan_ingram]

Tarkin is not dead.

Tarkin is in the same state that Vorbis was 3 years ago. No-one sensible thinks that it should be competing with MPEG-4/Sorensen/VP* at the moment. No-one connected with the project (only a couple of people, working in their spare time) has been promoting this project as competitive -- only some losers who hype every piece of open source software, no matter how far along in development the software it.

Come back in 2/3 years, and Tarkin will be looking much better.