7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
TiVO already uses GPLv2 code. Since they are enforcing their own patents on the use of said software they are in violation of the GPL when distributing the software running those DVRs. When they or any retailer sell a box or send a software update they are, thus, committing copyright violation.
This means that while they can nail Dish network for patent violation, they themselves have committed a copyright violation and opened themselves up to lawsuits from thousands of developers.
Like McDonald's board of directors meeting over poor sales in India, clueless to the ethical views of that market.
Sales VP: "They don't like our beef"
Marketing VP: "So we'll give them better beef, fresher!"
Technical VP: "We could slaughter the cow on site if it helps"
Sales VP: "That could be a great slogan, 'fresh from the cow'"
[cue standard nods of agreement and voicing of support from around the table]
I think I speak here for a fairly wide swath of GNU/Linux developers and distributors:
While the quality of the driver and it's release is of some importance, the license of that driver is the deal breaker.
Give us a poor driver with a free (as in freedom) license and the community will make it great.
Give us an excellent driver with a proprietary license and only a minority of users will use it.
Why?
Many distros (I'll use Fedora as an example) will not package proprietary drivers. Ubuntu, which I believe is the most popular right now, is on the fence and, at the very least, warns the user.
This is part of the fundamental nature of GNU/Linux: It's about freedom. Does AMD understand this yet? It doesn't seem so.
Moreso, because most free software developers ignore ATI's drivers as proprietary, there is little GNU/Linux software that takes advantage of the higher end cards. The DRI drivers on an r200/r300 card work just fine for almost everything.
Why would a user, then, pay $100+ for a higher-end video card when a $35 Radeon 9250 is better supported? For users it's thus a choice of price/benefit if nothing else.
If AMD wants to work better with our community they need to join our community. Break the closed development loop in favor of integrating their paid developers and "volunteer" driver developers, there's a number of skilled developers with DRI that I'm sure would be very willing to help should AMD do this.
The key to the whole issue is that Microsoft doesn't name any of the patents. Exactly. They don't need to disclose which patents are infringing because they never expect this to end up in court, that's exactly what the don't want. Instead they're going to make big, vauge claims and intimidate corps like Novell and Dell into signing royalty agreements.
I have to agree. I'd hope the Plone group would be "with-it" enough to realize the ethical conflict they've put themselves in by only releasing a video about freedom using proprietary codecs.
While keeping in mind that 80%+ of Internet users have never heard of Ogg, a vast majority of the people listening to Moglen have & would highly prefer it. Besides, Vorbis is vastly superior quality to MP3.
Soya3d is excellent for a beginning programmer being as it's very high level and beautifully maps 3d objects to programming objects. It's also powerful enough to be used for "professional" games designed with low/mid level hardware in mind.
It's available for GNU/Linux, MacOSX, and Windows. You can even use standard tools to build a Windows.exe of your finished program which doesn't require the end user to install either Python or Soya.
The documentation for Soya is a bit lacking, though there's many examples available in both finished games which use it and a set of tutorials available in a seperate package for download. One example, gameskel-5, shows how easy writting a game can be.
Unlike Panda, Soya is available under a free software license (GPL-2).
ISPs who do this sort of thing will, undoubtedly, be replaced by ISPs which don't. Consumers simply won't tolerate it, nor will web services.
The only real danger is the growing monopolization of Internet access, through cable and DSL, but yet we watch as wifi-based Internet access spreads and their market crumbles beneith their feet.
More fuel on the fire, BellSouth, it'll only help speed your own destruction.
Do you know what Opera does "under the hood"? No, you don't. They may not be putting banner advertisements on your screen anymore, but they could be running any number of market analysis programs, watching what websites you visit and reporting it back to a central server, or any number of other privacy-busting behaviors.
A majority of giftware on the market today is malware, the creators "paid" through marketing or market analysis.
Opera should look into a similar strategy as Real Networks, adapting their business strategy with the changing paradigm of software production. If not, evolution will ensure their short lifespan. It really is that simple.
> Anyone who was on the verge of switching before now have virtually no reason not to.
Here's a reason why not to: free as in beer != freedom, and for those of us who value freedom, giftware isn't enough. Prehaps in the pre-Mozilla days Opera could have made a run with a proprietary, giftware browser..
What's a good way of putting this.. this move is a bit too little, too late, IMHO.
Yes. Add "oggvorbis speex flac theora" to your USE variables.
You can also emerge libtheora first, just to make sure. mplayer/xine will only build with Theora support if you have libtheora on the system, and that may or may not happen automatically if you have the "theora" use variable in place first.
We put up some sample video torrents including the three winning Creative Commons videos and a full length independent film called "Honey". All of them are made available under Creative Commons licenses.
Free videos in a free format, fancy that?
Share and enjoy!
If your goal is just a home WIFI AP and you want to save money, this isn't the way to do it. You can pickup a decent 802.11a (or g) AP from Pricewatch for under $100. Linksys even makes a 802.11g AP
that runs GNU/Linux and allows you to load your own software onto it.
However, if you're looking for something custom, there's just no better way than building it yourself. I recommend picking up a nice VIA EPIA 800 from CWLinux preloaded with their LinuxBIOS and toss in one or two WiFi cards (one A, one G).
Some examples of the kind of flexibility this gives you is offering IPv6 support, packet tunneling to hide your upstream, or setting up a custom website which all new users of the hotspot will be given when they try to access any website until they've activated their service (EULA, payment, whatever).
The minimum the hardware for this is going to run around $350. With only a few extra features, it can easily run over $500. That $40 802.11a AP from Pricewatch sure looks like a good deal now, doesn't it?
Ogg Theora, the first patent-free video codec for Ogg, has been available for some time now and is not in "only in early development". It's based on On2's VP3, with several enhancements for better compression, and will be released as Beta-1 early next month. Basically, their last task is to finish documenting the stream format before the Beta release.
"OGM" is a spin-off of Ogg from some time ago which hacks together Ogg (a great stream container format) and FourCC (the codec identity field from AVI) to easily add proprietary codecs (ie, DivX, XviD, other MPEG derivatives) to Ogg. Obviously, this is not endorsed by Xiph, the creators of Ogg and Vorbis, as they don't support patent-encumbered codecs.
Also, Ogg is not an acronym, so capitalizing every letter is incorrect. This is a common mistake.:-)
This is just a lesson to all those other potential terrorists out about what happens to those who use plain-text email. Now they'll just begin using GNU Privacy Guard to keep the NSA from sniffing their plans. What next, outlaw the use of encryption?
I got a better idea. How about we stop terrorism by fixing the problems that cause it? Turning the world into a police state is obviously not the solution anyone wants and, so far, has only led to more terrorism. People are not born wanting to fly planes into buildings, so what has driven these people to such a level of desperation that they're willing to sacrifice their lives to kill thousands of innocent people?
The fact remains that DivX is MPEG-4, because it's patent encumbered it cannot be implemented with Free Software. Many people don't realise this. They think that because there's GPL'ed software available to encode/decode DivX/XviD that the format is free.
In reality, the royalty requirements of these formats makes GPL'ed software undistributable by anyone but the copyright holder (since it's the copyright holder's responsibility to enforce the copyright they're not going to sue themselves).
For both commercial and non-commercial uses, royalty-free codecs (such as VP3/Theora) will always top proprietary formats such as DivX.
What they're doing now is adding fields to the various headers for flexibility down the road. One example of this is that, unlike VP3, each frame can have more than one quality setting (so that large sections of black/etc won't use the same bandwidth as the hero waving the light sabre).
These things are not implemented yet, and will probobally not be useable on earlier Beta releases either, but as of Beta-1 the bitstream will not change in future-compatable ways. That is, while some optimisation fields won't be supported yet, no new fields will be added. Future players will always be able to play media encoded by the Beta releases. The same is not true for movies encoded with the Alpha libraries, so Beta-1 is really the first point where it should be used for distributed movies.
The 1.0 release will include support for atleast decoding these optional fields, it'll likely use them all too for encoding, and should be considerably higher quality than the VP3.2 codec from which it started with. It'll always, however, be able to upgrade VP3.2 media to Theora and, again, always be able to play media encoded with the Beta releases.
It's ironic to think of Theora as a "Real-killer", while it does compete on the same field as Real's proprietary video streaming codecs, Real is adopting Theora for the video format in their Helix suite (and throwing money at Xiph to help get Theora out faster).
I've seen Theora be streamed with Icecast (check out the last Ogg Traffic), I've seen decent quality Theora video at 80kbps (320x240@30 even), and I've seen how well it works in an Ogg container, vs Quicktime/AVI which (unlike Ogg) were not designed for streaming.
But don't take my word for it, try it out for yourself! That's one of the reasons the Alpha releases are available to the general public. See what it can do, and prehaps, drop us a donation through Paypal or Affero to help the Theora hackers spend more time hacking.
Patents. DivX is just a series of alpha-releases for MPEG-4 and is covered by the same set of patents (from dozens of different companies). They're only being nice about DivX until MPEG-4 comes out, then they're going to "crack down".
Remember when MP3 was gaining popularity, Frauhofer just let everyone do whatever they wanted with players, encoders, etc... but once they realised they had something worth charging for they cracked down and their lawyers started sending everyone ceise and desist orders.
Ogg Theora is not encumbered by patents. It is, and will always be, royalty-free. To my knowledge it is the first video codec that can be implemented in truly Free Software.
Note that these are transcoded. That means that you get the loss of the original plus the loss of Theora. A few of us put them together last minute because so many people were having trouble viewing the ones on creative common's website..
Ogg Theora is actually very close to beta release. It's still VP3.2 with no improvements beyond adding flexibility for future improvements. The goal of this is that files made with Beta-1 will be viewable by any future player, making it suitable for archival use, but as beta's progress more optimisations will be made making it both faster and higher quality.
We just put together a set of videos (transcoded, so lower quality than origs) for those who don't want to use non-free software to view them.
You'll need a BitTorrent client and a fairly recent (post-November) copy of libtheora, as they're encoded with Ogg Theora.
This one.torrent will download all three videos and a README explaining how to view them.
Got one better for you. The second place video, "Mixtape", is available in Ogg Theora format here courtesy her brother (who's involved with Xiph).
If anyone can get the first video to play please publish how. I've been unable to get it to play with either MPlayer or Xine.
Re:for non-pro/home broadcasting to take off
on
Icecast 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Peercast has alot of issues with it. First, and most important to me, is while they GPL'ed the software and made the source available they added the additional restriction that modified versions of the Peercast code could not connect to "their network". This is presumably their attempt at security, since anyone could easily act as a Peercast client sharing a stream but replace it with their own content (ie, insert commercials). In reality the license is not likely to stop these kinds of activities, however, it does impede 3rd party development of compatable clients (ie, XMMS plugin for Peercast).
A group of us have been working on another project called IceShare with the hopes of providing the free software community with a real P2P multimedia solution which anyone can use and adopt in their own software. Additionally, IceShare is intended for streaming non-continuous media as well, such as CD tracks or archived videos, whereas a media player could not only use the media as it's being transfered but also seek to a not-yet-downloaded parts of the media (where the download focus changes to the new seekpoint).
There's another attempt at P2P streaming as well called Gnomoradio, currently at version 0.7. I have not tried it myself nor do I know anymore than the announcement they sent out about it.
See above thread about OggFile (Alternative Codecs). Icecast will likely support streaming Ogg Vorbis+Theora (and other codec combinations) when OggFile is released.
Media players which support Ogg Theora alpha-2 (Xine and mplayer) already support streaming Ogg video. If you have one of these players compiled with Theora support, try opening it with a url from here.
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This means that while they can nail Dish network for patent violation, they themselves have committed a copyright violation and opened themselves up to lawsuits from thousands of developers.
Like McDonald's board of directors meeting over poor sales in India, clueless to the ethical views of that market. Sales VP: "They don't like our beef" Marketing VP: "So we'll give them better beef, fresher!" Technical VP: "We could slaughter the cow on site if it helps" Sales VP: "That could be a great slogan, 'fresh from the cow'" [cue standard nods of agreement and voicing of support from around the table]
I think I speak here for a fairly wide swath of GNU/Linux developers and distributors: While the quality of the driver and it's release is of some importance, the license of that driver is the deal breaker. Give us a poor driver with a free (as in freedom) license and the community will make it great. Give us an excellent driver with a proprietary license and only a minority of users will use it. Why? Many distros (I'll use Fedora as an example) will not package proprietary drivers. Ubuntu, which I believe is the most popular right now, is on the fence and, at the very least, warns the user. This is part of the fundamental nature of GNU/Linux: It's about freedom. Does AMD understand this yet? It doesn't seem so. Moreso, because most free software developers ignore ATI's drivers as proprietary, there is little GNU/Linux software that takes advantage of the higher end cards. The DRI drivers on an r200/r300 card work just fine for almost everything. Why would a user, then, pay $100+ for a higher-end video card when a $35 Radeon 9250 is better supported? For users it's thus a choice of price/benefit if nothing else. If AMD wants to work better with our community they need to join our community. Break the closed development loop in favor of integrating their paid developers and "volunteer" driver developers, there's a number of skilled developers with DRI that I'm sure would be very willing to help should AMD do this.
I have to agree. I'd hope the Plone group would be "with-it" enough to realize the ethical conflict they've put themselves in by only releasing a video about freedom using proprietary codecs.
While keeping in mind that 80%+ of Internet users have never heard of Ogg, a vast majority of the people listening to Moglen have & would highly prefer it. Besides, Vorbis is vastly superior quality to MP3.
Soya3d is excellent for a beginning programmer being as it's very high level and beautifully maps 3d objects to programming objects. It's also powerful enough to be used for "professional" games designed with low/mid level hardware in mind.
.exe of your finished program which doesn't require the end user to install either Python or Soya.
It's available for GNU/Linux, MacOSX, and Windows. You can even use standard tools to build a Windows
The documentation for Soya is a bit lacking, though there's many examples available in both finished games which use it and a set of tutorials available in a seperate package for download. One example, gameskel-5, shows how easy writting a game can be.
Unlike Panda, Soya is available under a free software license (GPL-2).
ISPs who do this sort of thing will, undoubtedly, be replaced by ISPs which don't. Consumers simply won't tolerate it, nor will web services.
The only real danger is the growing monopolization of Internet access, through cable and DSL, but yet we watch as wifi-based Internet access spreads and their market crumbles beneith their feet.
More fuel on the fire, BellSouth, it'll only help speed your own destruction.
A majority of giftware on the market today is malware, the creators "paid" through marketing or market analysis.
Opera should look into a similar strategy as Real Networks, adapting their business strategy with the changing paradigm of software production. If not, evolution will ensure their short lifespan. It really is that simple.
Here's a reason why not to: free as in beer != freedom, and for those of us who value freedom, giftware isn't enough. Prehaps in the pre-Mozilla days Opera could have made a run with a proprietary, giftware browser..
What's a good way of putting this.. this move is a bit too little, too late, IMHO.
Another example of free software going where proprietary software cannot, or dares not, go.
You can also emerge libtheora first, just to make sure. mplayer/xine will only build with Theora support if you have libtheora on the system, and that may or may not happen automatically if you have the "theora" use variable in place first.
We put up some sample video torrents including the three winning Creative Commons videos and a full length independent film called "Honey". All of them are made available under Creative Commons licenses. Free videos in a free format, fancy that? Share and enjoy!
The expansion boards also make the cards flat along with the motherboard so the entire setup takes more space as a result.
However, if you're looking for something custom, there's just no better way than building it yourself. I recommend picking up a nice VIA EPIA 800 from CWLinux preloaded with their LinuxBIOS and toss in one or two WiFi cards (one A, one G).
Some examples of the kind of flexibility this gives you is offering IPv6 support, packet tunneling to hide your upstream, or setting up a custom website which all new users of the hotspot will be given when they try to access any website until they've activated their service (EULA, payment, whatever).
The minimum the hardware for this is going to run around $350. With only a few extra features, it can easily run over $500. That $40 802.11a AP from Pricewatch sure looks like a good deal now, doesn't it?
"OGM" is a spin-off of Ogg from some time ago which hacks together Ogg (a great stream container format) and FourCC (the codec identity field from AVI) to easily add proprietary codecs (ie, DivX, XviD, other MPEG derivatives) to Ogg. Obviously, this is not endorsed by Xiph, the creators of Ogg and Vorbis, as they don't support patent-encumbered codecs.
Also, Ogg is not an acronym, so capitalizing every letter is incorrect. This is a common mistake. :-)
I got a better idea. How about we stop terrorism by fixing the problems that cause it? Turning the world into a police state is obviously not the solution anyone wants and, so far, has only led to more terrorism. People are not born wanting to fly planes into buildings, so what has driven these people to such a level of desperation that they're willing to sacrifice their lives to kill thousands of innocent people?
In reality, the royalty requirements of these formats makes GPL'ed software undistributable by anyone but the copyright holder (since it's the copyright holder's responsibility to enforce the copyright they're not going to sue themselves).
For both commercial and non-commercial uses, royalty-free codecs (such as VP3/Theora) will always top proprietary formats such as DivX.
These things are not implemented yet, and will probobally not be useable on earlier Beta releases either, but as of Beta-1 the bitstream will not change in future-compatable ways. That is, while some optimisation fields won't be supported yet, no new fields will be added. Future players will always be able to play media encoded by the Beta releases. The same is not true for movies encoded with the Alpha libraries, so Beta-1 is really the first point where it should be used for distributed movies.
The 1.0 release will include support for atleast decoding these optional fields, it'll likely use them all too for encoding, and should be considerably higher quality than the VP3.2 codec from which it started with. It'll always, however, be able to upgrade VP3.2 media to Theora and, again, always be able to play media encoded with the Beta releases.
I've seen Theora be streamed with Icecast (check out the last Ogg Traffic), I've seen decent quality Theora video at 80kbps (320x240@30 even), and I've seen how well it works in an Ogg container, vs Quicktime/AVI which (unlike Ogg) were not designed for streaming.
But don't take my word for it, try it out for yourself! That's one of the reasons the Alpha releases are available to the general public. See what it can do, and prehaps, drop us a donation through Paypal or Affero to help the Theora hackers spend more time hacking.
Remember when MP3 was gaining popularity, Frauhofer just let everyone do whatever they wanted with players, encoders, etc... but once they realised they had something worth charging for they cracked down and their lawyers started sending everyone ceise and desist orders.
Ogg Theora is not encumbered by patents. It is, and will always be, royalty-free. To my knowledge it is the first video codec that can be implemented in truly Free Software.
Ogg Theora is actually very close to beta release. It's still VP3.2 with no improvements beyond adding flexibility for future improvements. The goal of this is that files made with Beta-1 will be viewable by any future player, making it suitable for archival use, but as beta's progress more optimisations will be made making it both faster and higher quality.
Once again, the URL to download the Ogg Theora versions of these videos, for those using Free Software media players, is http://xiph.org/~arc/CreativeCommons-OggTheora.tor rent
This one .torrent will download all three videos and a README explaining how to view them.
Got one better for you. The second place video, "Mixtape", is available in Ogg Theora format here courtesy her brother (who's involved with Xiph). If anyone can get the first video to play please publish how. I've been unable to get it to play with either MPlayer or Xine.
A group of us have been working on another project called IceShare with the hopes of providing the free software community with a real P2P multimedia solution which anyone can use and adopt in their own software. Additionally, IceShare is intended for streaming non-continuous media as well, such as CD tracks or archived videos, whereas a media player could not only use the media as it's being transfered but also seek to a not-yet-downloaded parts of the media (where the download focus changes to the new seekpoint).
There's another attempt at P2P streaming as well called Gnomoradio, currently at version 0.7. I have not tried it myself nor do I know anymore than the announcement they sent out about it.
Media players which support Ogg Theora alpha-2 (Xine and mplayer) already support streaming Ogg video. If you have one of these players compiled with Theora support, try opening it with a url from here.