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Royalty-free blanket patent licensing is compatible with Free Software and should be considered the same as being unpatented. Even if it's conditioned on a gran

Royalty-free blanket patent licensing is compatible with Free Software and should be considered the same as being unpatented. Even if it's conditioned on a grant of reciprocality. It's only when patent holders start demanding money (or worse, withholding licenses altogether) that it becomes a problem for us.

ksec 6y ago
>Royalty-free blanket patent licensing is compatible with Free Software and should be considered the same as being unpatented. If I remember correctly, Firefox at one point refuse to include h.264 decoder even if they granted royalty free usage because the codec is considered patent encumbered.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  That's why the word "blanket" is included there - if you just give Firefox and Firefox alone a royalty-free H.264 license, that's not compatible with Free Software, you can't legally fork it without getting another patent license that will almost certainly cost money. AFAIK the thing Firefox refused to accept wound up happening anyway. Cisco released a nominally BSD-licensed H.264 decoder and agreed to pay the maximum royalty possible to MPEG-LA. If you use their specific codec binaries, then you're covered under the patent license. So Mozilla wound up writing a new plugin framework specifically to host OpenH264 so that WebRTC could have a standard codec.
CharlesW 6y ago
> Royalty-free blanket patent licensing is compatible with Free Software and should be considered the same as being unpatented. I agree 100%, and am not the person arguing that patent-encumbered technology is incompatible with free software or bad in any way. The point of my unpopular post is simply that making a decision based on whether a technology is patent-encumbered makes zero sense in this case since all of them are.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  The terms of the patent grant matter. AV1 and WebP are free-to-use. H.265 has a fee per encoder and decoder.

ksec 6y ago

>Royalty-free blanket patent licensing is compatible with Free Software and should be considered the same as being unpatented. If I remember correctly, Firefox at one point refuse to include h.264 decoder even if they granted royalty free usage because the codec is considered patent encumbered.

kmeisthax 6y ago
That's why the word "blanket" is included there - if you just give Firefox and Firefox alone a royalty-free H.264 license, that's not compatible with Free Software, you can't legally fork it without getting another patent license that will almost certainly cost money. AFAIK the thing Firefox refused to accept wound up happening anyway. Cisco released a nominally BSD-licensed H.264 decoder and agreed to pay the maximum royalty possible to MPEG-LA. If you use their specific codec binaries, then you're covered under the patent license. So Mozilla wound up writing a new plugin framework specifically to host OpenH264 so that WebRTC could have a standard codec.

CharlesW 6y ago

> Royalty-free blanket patent licensing is compatible with Free Software and should be considered the same as being unpatented. I agree 100%, and am not the person arguing that patent-encumbered technology is incompatible with free software or bad in any way. The point of my unpopular post is simply that making a decision based on whether a technology is patent-encumbered makes zero sense in this case since all of them are.

freeone3000 6y ago
The terms of the patent grant matter. AV1 and WebP are free-to-use. H.265 has a fee per encoder and decoder.