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Canonical Explains Decision to License H.264 For Ubuntu

Posted by timothy on from the less-painful-to-pay dept.

tux writes with this snippet from The Register: "Ubuntu's commercial sponsor Canonical has tried to clarify how — if not why — it has licensed a closed-source and patented codec for video on PCs running its Linux. Canonical is the first Linux shop to have agreed to license the codec in question, H.264, from MPEG LA. Even though Red Hat and Novell are also available for use on PCs, they have not licensed H.264."

1 of 372 comments (clear)

  1. Re:HOW? by node+3 · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Since TFS is so suckily misleading, I actually RTFA this time. Everybody's been saying it's legally impossible for Mozilla to license H.264 for Firefox, because MPEG LA requires a limit on the number of installs or something. Of course since Ubuntu is freely distributable, all the same arguments would apply. So WTF?

    To answer your "WTF?", the problem is that everybody's been lying about Firefox. There are absolutely no legal reasons why they can't license H.264, just as there are no legal reasons Canonical can't. Which is why they were able to do it. WTF averted, problem solved.