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If being covered by software patents made something proprietary, the entire world would be proprietary, nearly every single open source project included.
by DarkShikari 17y ago
If being covered by software patents made something proprietary, the entire world would be proprietary, nearly every single open source project included.
- ZeroGravitas 17y agoAfter I wrote that I recognised the ambiguity and I was going to go back and edit it to say something like "actively enforced patents to generate licence fees", but I thought it was obvious enough as it was, given the context.
- DarkShikari 17y agoI still don't like that definition, since it confuses the vast majority of multimedia formats with formats that are actually proprietary. I prefer to reserve the word proprietary for formats where the specification is either secret or does not exist and any free implementations were reverse-engineered, e.g. RealVideo, Windows Media Audio, and so forth. It doesn't make sense IMO to simply call 98% of everything proprietary; it sort of weakens the meaning of the word to overuse it as such.