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OSI President Questions WebM Patent License Compatibility with Open Source
Via the H comes a report that the Simon Phipps, current President of the Open Source Initiative, thinks that the VP8 patent Cross-license agreeement Google brokered with the MPEG-LA is incompatible with the Open Source definition. The primary problems are that the license is not sub-licensable and only covers certain uses, leading to conflict with OSD clauses five, six, and seven. Phipps concludes: "As a consequence, I suggest the license is flawed when considered in relation to open source projects and is likely to be negatively received by many communities that value software freedom. Doubtless a case can be made that the patent license is optional, but I suspect the community issues may remain. Once again we're left with our fingers crossed. Google's making the right noises, but this draft agreement seems like a particularly unworkable approach for free and open source software. Its failure to allow sublicensing seems like a major flaw. Even if this doesn't result in a requirement for all end-users to sign the agreement, the discrepancies between this document and the OSD leave it disruptive to open source adoption of VP8."
Did anyone really expect the MPEG-LA to offer license terms that were amenable to FOSS goals? That would eliminate their ability to exert and enforce control over the market.
Patents have no value in conveying knowledge these days, they are simply artillery for court battles and chains you can yank to control the actions of others.
VP8/WebM is the only halfway-viable competitor to h264. Don't demand perfection, you won't get it.
Yawn. 1/10, jimmies un-rustled.
Your troll material is derivative and you lay it on too thick. You open with founding fathers? That's a red flag. You blew your load too early. A good troll draws the reader in with a plausible premise, then jabs the knife of absurdity once interest is caught and defenses lowered.
No one uses WebM. Google dropped the ball. Now even Mozilla is allowing their browser to use the underlying OS to support H.264 playback. This ship has sailed. Better luck next time.
Pretty sure this is why Mozilla originally decided to instead back Ogg Theora video.
I didn't know why youtube was so sluggish after the reinstalling my operating system. Turns out it automagically enlisted me in its html5 test and loaded vp8 versions of the videos, instead of mp4/h264. The whole experience was bad, not responsive enough, even running it on a i7-2600 cpu.
Pfff. I've been here since the beginning. I've was posting about hot grits and imagining beowulf clusters while you were in diapers. AC is the grandaddy of "Anonymous"
If anything, this place needs a bit more 4chan. The commentary here is now stale, old, boring. Most of the good posters of have moved on. Way, way, way too many crusty basement librarians yammering about how the government can never do anything right.. While communicating on a network created by the government.
Did anyone really expect the MPEG-LA to offer license terms that were amenable to FOSS goals? That would eliminate their ability to exert and enforce control over the market.
WebM is a distribution codec for the web.
The MPEG LA licensors are a global R&D and manufacturing combine of breathtaking size, scope and power. The licensees are built on the same scale. MPEG LA
One thing about this is that this isn't the only license, nor is it even the license of most interest to open-source projects wanting to use the WebM codebase. The license here is for a bare patent license independent of any software or code. If you're wanting to use the WebM code, you're more interested in the Additional IP Rights Grant that'd apply in that case. You'd only be interested in the cross-license agreement if you wanted the patents alone and weren't using WebM in an open-source project.
It's great to write an article outlining the problem, but it would be nice if he offered a better solution. Google put WebM / VP8 / VP9 out there are open source with a strong belief that it didn't infringe the H264 patents. Turns out the scum at MPEG-LA rounded up some patents for an attack and Google has made some effort to allow use of those patents. What else could they do? Go to court and get the claims thrown out? Perhaps, but what it some are valid claims?
We can hope that Google has a larger strategy than they are letting on. The thing to do is get WebM out there to take power away from MPEG-LA. For the short term that means Google, Android, and the major browsers have to be able to use it, and then YouTube needs to use it exclusively. Everyone else can use the code, but it's kinda hard for Google to influence other patent holders. Rather than just complain, the author and OSI should propose a better solution - there isn't one.
BTW, your phone probably supports VP8 - Android has supported it in software since 2.3(?) and Google has made hardware implementations available for some time now with many SoC vendors licensing it (for free).
Open source is about copyrights. This is a patent. What relevance does a patent bear on whether a piece of software is open source?