On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 9:28 AM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > The issue for RTC is that we could be using a royalty free codec, such as > VP8 instead. Accepting the binary makes it more likely that h.264 will be > made mandatory to implement, which means any company not wanting to > implement VP8 can always point to h.264 being mandatory as an excuse not to > support VP8. Conformance with the specification may require the implementation of H.264 if the decision to make H.264 mandatory to implement. This means that those who care about conformance (e.g. those responding to RFPs) would need to deal with the consequences. Many people here have expressed the sentiment that Fedora would be unable to utilize this option. This is stark contrast to the claims made to the working group so far. If it is the case that fedora will not utilize this option (or another to obtain h264 support) and you care about avoiding an outcome where Fedora is unable to claim conformance with the spec, then someone probably ought to comment about this to the working group. Commenting to the WG list may not change the working group's outcome, commenting here surely won't. > Another thing to worry about is how the binary is licensed. Accepting that > license (even in places where software patents don't apply) could > potentially cause issues. I haven't read the license for it yet, but most I've seen this sentiment expressed in several posts. There are H.264 patents in the MPEG-LA AVC patent pool current and issued in something like 46 countries. I haven't checked what percentage of the world's population the list covers, but I would be surprised if it weren't on the order of >95%. ( http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.pdf ) In the US, at least, accepting a patent license (even paying for one) doesn't preclude you from challenging the validity of a patent. -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
