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Sigma Designs/XVid Update

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the twelve-step-program dept.

Reagen Ward and many other people have written in with updates to the Sigma Designs/XVid situation, reported a few days ago. Sigma has replied in email and a press release that they intend to make the source code available, however, they seem to be paying lip service at best to the terms of the GNU Public License. Grant Gross from Newsforge has been pursuing the story and in a story yesterday and another today lays out the current situation.

1 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. It's far from being over by fluor2 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Doom9 is an independent "journalist" that seem to have a very good overview at things in the encoding scene. Here is a sniplet from what he writes:

    "First an update on the XviD situation. The release of the Sigma source code does not mean it's all over, it's far from being over. The license agreement which you have to agree to before you can download, and install the codec is not compatible with the GPL. Furthermore, it can now clearly be seen (download the source code and have a look for yourself) that the Sigma codec is pretty much a copy of the XviD codec, but all the copyright notices of the original developers have been removed and replaced. This does not only violate the GPL but copyright laws - you can't just take a program, change a few lines and change the copyright statements, you only have copyright protection for the parts you wrote on your own. And related to this the Sigma codec also contains code taken from the OpenDivX project, the files were outfitted with 2 different copyright notices which is quite funny."

    I hope that Sigma will respect GPL licences. I will for sure stop every purchase of Sigma stuff where I work.