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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.'"
Man, you just live to pimp that blog of yours whenever this topic comes up, don't you?
Must you post that FUD in every single Theora- and WebM-related topic *ever*? what you're asking for is something that, quite honestly, would be so fucking dangerous to Google that no company, I repeat, NO company in the industry would even dare *suggest* something of the sort.
And that's without comparing them to MPEG-LA, whose licensing terms are so fucking shallow that they don't even protect you from *them* if you happen to use a patent of theirs not included in the tiny list your MPEG4 license pays for, or you do use one of those but in a manner they don't approve of.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
I'm really annoyed at Google for this bullshit, and the new license is only going to increase adoption of a technology that should have been stillborn.