Quote:
Originally Posted by titlis
But x264 is Open Source anyway. Do we have to worry about stealing some algorithm which is completely public?
I mean we can't prohibit people from stealing x264 since it's open source, isn't it?
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x264 is open source under the GPL, which is a rather stringent license that makes strict rules about what you can and cannot do when distributing it. Among other things, you cannot use as part of a proprietary application (you can buy a commercial license for this purpose, but that license still requires you to contribute back any changes you make to x264).
Additionally, even in the cases where this doesn't apply (e.g. a web-based encoding service), it's good to be able to embarrass plagiarists. For example, "Raystream", a recent (and horrifically done) scam company advertised their "amazing proprietary encoding technology", which was of course just x264 on default settings with no modifications.