H264/AVC licence

[shlezman]

http://www.vialicensing.com/developments/avc/license.terms.html

This is the first draft of the AVC/H.264 licensing terms. The hope for a free baseline turns out to be nothing but a dream.
Something (maybe my paranoia) tells me that M$ is in someway behind this decision, cause making the baseline free will crush the WMV9.

Other then that,the fees are reasonable and very similar to MPEG4

[Sirber]

hum... that sucks. We'll have to relay on RV9 and rududu then :D

[deXtoRious]

I think I didn't understand that fully :(
Did they mean that anyone can get the SDK, write the program and pay royalties only for distribution?

[shlezman]

"Implementation providers (companies providing chipsets, board assemblies other than to end users, firmware code, software development kits, reference design hardware, and similar non-end-user products) are not required to execute a license"

You can develop for free, when you distribute the codecs, you'll have to pay per codec (software/hardware/encoder/decoder).

@Siber - Sorry but I couldnt read through all the 1 zilion licences that RN require you to agree with, but I suspect that distributing RV isnt free (understatement). Sure that backing up your personal DVD's will probably will not get the RN layers at your door, unless you make money out of that :devil:

[Tommy Carrot]

Then baseline profile makes no sense, because main profile is much more powerful, and we should pay for both. :mad:

[deXtoRious]

You can develop for free, when you distribute the codecs, you'll have to pay per codec (software/hardware/encoder/decoder).

Wonderful! So I can create free programs! :)

[temporance]

> Wonderful! So I can create free programs!

Yes, but you can never share them with anyone unless you pay!

[deXtoRious]

Well, let's assume, you're all my beta testers, OK? :D
Besides, those people (mostly in Latvia and Russia) who I want to distribute this to, don't really care about irrelevant things like legal programs ;)

[Neo Neko]

Distribution concerns binaries. Well at least in general terms. So the loophole here would be to provide code that is simple to compile. Better yet that is simple to compile with free compilers like GCC. All requirements and resources linked. The compiler free. Anyone can make their own binaries without ever having to distribute anything but the code(the idea) and not the product itself.

[deXtoRious]

Is it allowed to, let's say, e-mail binaries (non-publicly) to beta testers?

[shlezman]

Another idea is to distribute an install package that includes sources and compiler, which compiles the sources in install time, I wonder if this trick will work, I'll have to ask my lawyer:D

P.S.
This licensing issue is also valid to xvid distribution.

[temporance]

Originally posted by Neo Neko
Distribution concerns binaries. Well at least in general terms. So the loophole here would be to provide code that is simple to compile. Better yet that is simple to compile with free compilers like GCC. All requirements and resources linked. The compiler free. Anyone can make their own binaries without ever having to distribute anything but the code(the idea) and not the product itself. If we take this idea too far and it gets too easy to compile a patent-ridden piece of software, then we may soon see source-only infringement suits. When this happens, the rule-of-thumb "source is OK" will no longer be true and it will be a sad day for open-source software.

Originally posted by deXtoRious
Is it allowed to, let's say, e-mail binaries (non-publicly) to beta testers? In the eyes of the law, it doesn't make any difference whether the distribution is public or private. In practice though, who's going to know?