OSI President Questions WebM Patent License Compatibility with Open Source

Posted by Unknown on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @03:41AM from the just-a-bit-of-a-snag dept.

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."

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VP8 isn't there yet by Anonymous Coward · 2013-05-22 05:22 · Score: 0, Troll

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.