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Tandberg Attempts To Patent Open Source Code

Posted by Soulskill on from the cut-and-paste-your-way-to-innovation dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As if the current situation with software patents wasn't bad enough, it appears a new phenomenon is emerging: companies are watching the commit logs of open source projects for ideas to patent. In this case, Tandberg filed a patent that was step-by-step identical to an algorithm developed by the x264 project — a mere two months after the original commit. The particular algorithm is a useful performance optimization in a wide variety of video encoders, including Theora."

1 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Re:If you can't invent it... by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 0, Troll

    Yay to innovation! Reinventing the wheel a thousand times, will of course speed up progress manifolds..

    You realize that there are consequences to choosing the GPL, just as for any other choice in software development? One of those consequences is that you automatically exclude large portions of people and corporations from using your code. That may be what you want - on the other hand you seem to find it offensive. If it's a problem, use a less restrictive license*.

    *(Says the person who's developing and maintaining a GPLv2 project.)