WebM Licensing Problems Resolved

breser writes "The WebM licensing problems have been resolved. The copyright license is straight BSD now, and the patent license is separate and has no impact on the copyright license. Quoting Chris DiBona: 'As it was originally written, if a patent action was brought against Google, the patent license terminated. This provision itself is not unusual in an OSS license, and similar provisions exist in the 2nd Apache License and in version 3 of the GPL. The twist was that ours terminated "any" rights and not just rights to the patents, which made our license GPLv3 and GPLv2 incompatible. Also, in doing this, we effectively created a potentially new open source copyright license, something we are loath to do. Using patent language borrowed from both the Apache and GPLv3 patent clauses, in this new iteration of the patent clause we've decoupled patents from copyright, thus preserving the pure BSD nature of the copyright license. This means we are no longer creating a new open source copyright license, and the patent grant can exist on its own.'"

Comments

Re:So its still GPL incompatible because its BSD .

[EricJ2190]

I am no expert on licenses, but according to GNU, the 3-clause BSD license used by WebM is GPL-compatible. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses

Re:Still no patent-related indemnification

[h4rr4r]

None of the MPEG-LA licensing stuff offers indemnification.

MPEG-LA is just using that WebM patent pool for FUD.