x264 bounties: find these people!

[Dark Shikari]

We're almost done preparing to dual-license x264: what a mess this has been! We've gotten almost all the rights we need, including an agreement with Avail Media, x264's biggest corporate backer.

The really really short version: this will allow companies to license x264 to use in commercial products where the GPL would be prohibitive. x264 will of course remain free; the commercial version will be the same program, just under a different license. Of course, the companies will still be required to contribute back their improvements ;)

This leaves us with just three people left who I have been unable to contact:

philj [AT] csufresno [DOT] edu
imcold [AT] centrum [DOT] sk
noboru.asai [AT] gmail [DOT] com

This means finding newer emails, poking them with sharp sticks, etc.

I will give a $100 reward via Paypal to anyone whose information results in finding one of these people and getting their approval. One reward per person found, so up to $300 total. And do keep in mind, if you are one of these people... you can still claim the reward for finding yourself :p

[iwod]

Common People, the world needs x264.......

[Terka]

imcold [AT] centrum [DOT] sk
david petes from Slovakia-
you can contact him using facebook. he is the only david petes there.
http://www.facebook.com/confirmemail.php?next=https%3A%2F%2Flogin.facebook.com%2Freset.php#!/profile.php?id=1785713130&ref=search&sid=100000653790163.3678496215..1

[cyberbeing]

Phil J (a.k.a. Phil Jensen)
http://www.csufresno.edu/its/usg/directory.htm
Personal Home Page: http://www.philjensen.com/
Calendar of venues his band will play at: http://www.philjensen.com/shows.htm (outdated)
Contact information for his band (phone + email): http://www.philjensen.com/email.htm (outdated)

Edit: What Revgen posted seems more likely, the 'personal homepage' link on csufresno.edu feels like it could be a typo.
Edit2: It appears that www.philjensen.com was only his website until 2005, so the above info, except name, is useless.
Edit3: Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/people/Phil-Jensen/1576250812

[Revgen]

Here is what I could find on philj [AT] csufresno [DOT] edu

His name is Phil Jensen.

He used to work at CSU Fresno, but now works at a San Francisco company called Proofpoint.

Here is his profile at LinkedIn. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/phil-jensen/19/66b/294

Here is the company he works for. http://www.proofpoint.com/

[Dark Shikari]

Pinged Phil on Linkedin and David on Facebook; hopefully they're paying attention on those sites. If not, whoever finds another contact method will still get the bounty.

Noboru Asai seems like a harder one, since nobody knows how to de-romanize his name...

[HJRodrigo]

David also has a deviant art page
http://imclod.deviantart.com/
He has posted on your blog before so you may want to put you are trying to contact these people there as well

cyberbeing also posted Phil's face book
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1576250812

[creamyhorror]

Noboru Asai seems like a harder one, since nobody knows how to de-romanize his name...
It's 浅井登 - I'm guessing VFR_maniac and JEEB may be able to contact him.

15:55 (VFR_maniac) x264のjapanese commiterは私と浅井登氏だけだな
"the only japanese x264 committers are Asai Noboru-shi and me, huh"

[HJRodrigo]

That is good info. I assume that this maybe him as well http://github.com/asai , but I don't know.

[Revgen]

I was able to track down an e-mail address that was published as recently as 2008.

Noboru.Asai@itt.com

I don't if that's him though.

[creamyhorror]

Noboru.Asai@itt.com
That's a different guy, I believe. His name is 浅井 昇, while the man we want is 浅井 登.

edit:
Ah, found an old address of his (from 1999):

浅井 登 / Noboru Asai
[e-mail lich _at_ indigo.plala.or.jp]

[Revgen]

^Could be right.

There was a programmer named Noboru Asai who worked for Fujitsu in the 90's, but I haven't been able to trace anything more.

[HJRodrigo]

^Could be right.

There was a programmer named Noboru Asai who worked for Fujitsu in the 90's, but I haven't been able to trace anything more.

I don't think it is him. Here is a quick bio: "Noboru Asai graduated in 1972 with a degree in Mathematics from Nagoya University in 1972 and immediately joined Fujitsu Facom Ltd. After a year he moved to Fujitsu Ltd. In 1990 he was transferred to Fujitsu Shizuoka Engineering Ltd. After working on the development of Lisp, Prolog, APL BASIC and AI, etc., he began work on developing run-time library of VPP500 system. He is a member of Information Processing Institute."

[Revgen]

That's a different guy, I believe. His name is 浅井 昇, while the man we want is 浅井 登.

edit:
Ah, found an old address of his (from 1999):

浅井 登 / Noboru Asai
[e-mail lich _at_ indigo.plala.or.jp]

I found that too.

http://his.luky.org/ML/vine-users.0/msg02216.html

And he's responding to somebody who has a Fujitsu e-mail address. Doesn't mean that he's a former or current Fujitsu employee though, but it makes you wonder.

[creamyhorror]

I found that too.

http://his.luky.org/ML/vine-users.0/msg02216.html

That's the message I got it from. There's another one sent by him, but there's no further information to be gotten there.

And he's responding to somebody who has a Fujitsu e-mail address. Doesn't mean that he's a former or current Fujitsu employee though, but it makes you wonder.
It probably doesn't mean anything, since it's a Vine user mailing list and everyone has different addresses, from all sorts of providers and companies. He also doesn't know the Fujitsu employee, since he introduces himself and his submission.

In any case VFR_maniac, JEEB, or other Japanese x264 users/devs will probably know more about how to contact him (or if he's been around in the past year).

[pete]

The really really short version: this will allow companies to license x264 to use in commercial products where the GPL would be prohibitive.
Why not relicense it under LGPL?

[Dark Shikari]

Why not relicense it under LGPL?Some devs didn't want to, which was enough to kill that idea.

LGPL also still has the implicit patent clause that scares a lot of companies.

[Mutant_Fruit]

I'm sure you're aware of this, but just in case you aren't: If you can't get in touch with these people you can either get a clean room reimplementation of any pieces of code they contributed if they contributed a lot or if they contributed a small bit you could just revert their commits and reimplement the functionality another way. It is less than ideal, but a project I'm part of had to go the re-implement route recently as there were just too many contributors which could not be found.

[HJRodrigo]

I found these two phone numbers that are apparently Phil Jensens. I guess you could always call him Dark Shikari, as you both live in CA.
(408) 363-0314
(408) 269-2883

[Dark Shikari]

I'm sure you're aware of this, but just in case you aren't: If you can't get in touch with these people you can either get a clean room reimplementation of any pieces of code they contributed if they contributed a lot or if they contributed a small bit you could just revert their commits and reimplement the functionality another way. It is less than ideal, but a project I'm part of had to go the re-implement route recently as there were just too many contributors which could not be found.Of course, that's always in theory an option. But I don't think we'll have to do that.

[Terranigma]

Is the offer still good or what? Who still remains to be found?

[Dark Shikari]

Haven't gotten a response yet from any of the three, so technically the offers are still out there. Hopefully the leads I've pursued (facebook + linkedin) will do it, but who knows.

Noboru Asai is still in question, I have no real leads on him.

[JEEB]

Noboru Asai is still in question, I have no real leads on him.
Checked mixi (an SNS extremely popular in Japan) on his name. Got two results, but both people haven't been online for several days at least. Plus I can't seem to be able to message them >_> Will seek further.

I guess I'll ask around 2ch as well.

[creamyhorror]

Checked mixi (an SNS extremely popular in Japan) on his name. Got two results, but both people haven't been online for several days at least. Plus I can't seem to be able to message them >_> Will seek further.

I checked too, but neither looks likely (one's a middle-aged electronic salesman interested in horse racing...).

If we could find out a nickname or alias Mr Asai uses, it would probably be easier to find him. He doesn't seem to have any further activity under his real name.

[HJRodrigo]

Were the phone numbers no good?

[Dark Shikari]

Were the phone numbers no good?Going to wait until the weekdays to try those.

[Astrophizz]

What happens if one of them is deceased? (just a possibility, though of course there'd presumably be information to that effect)

[Dark Shikari]

What happens if one of them is deceased? (just a possibility, though of course there'd presumably be information to that effect)We'd remove or rewrite the code, probably.

It's not too hard; Noboru's contributions are just bugfixes (which hardly count in the first place), imcold just wrote a variance asm function, and Phil wrote the SPARC asm, which we could gut.

[HJRodrigo]

I found what I believe to be Dávid Pethes current e-mail (He is using it for his educational video codec project).

imcold (at) jabber (dot) sk

Here is his personal Page http://www.imcold.evilhosting.org/page/

Funny thing is that this info was quickly found, due to his Doom9 profile page.

[imcold]

I just found this thread and PM'd Dark Shikari, so it's one missing less.

[Revgen]

I just found this thread and PM'd Dark Shikari, so it's one missing less.

$100 bucks for ya. :p

[Daemon404]

Just thinking... maybe these people don't exactly appreciate people posting their email addresses publicly... especially if it's just some other random person's email. Spam bots will attack!

[HJRodrigo]

Just thinking... maybe these people don't exactly appreciate people posting their email addresses publicly... especially if it's just some other random person's email. Spam bots will attack!

That is what I thought at first. At first I PMed the info I found, just to discover it was already posted while trying to PM. I then realized the stuff is already out there and public info already, hence our ability to find it. The e-mails are ones already posted by the owners and available in a search. Try it for yourself.

[imcold]

$100 bucks for ya. :p
Not really. I was found due to Dark Shikari's post - I see it like he found me, so I don't claim the bounty.

[iwod]

Are we there yet?

[Dark Shikari]

Are we there yet?Got everyone except Phil Jenson, who I'll try calling on Monday if he still hasn't responded.

[HJRodrigo]

Great, so soon we should see it being used in a commercial product? :)

[iwod]

3 Months later, are we there yet?

[nurbs]

Apparently yes. (http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/x264-devel/2010-July/007508.html)

[HJRodrigo]

Sweet, although that message/post needs to be in a more noticable place. (So that companies that may be considering x264 as an option can see it). I also think x264 needs a webpage.

[Dark Shikari]

Sweet, although that message/post needs to be in a more noticable place. (So that companies that may be considering x264 as an option can see it). I also think x264 needs a webpage.We'll be getting one. At the moment, I have so many companies asking for licenses that advertising will just increase my workload!

[a451guy451]

I understand if you can't disclose, but I'm curious if any of the major "Pro" companies are making requests. Particularly Digital Rapids since I loathe their internal h264.

[Dark Shikari]

I understand if you can't disclose, but I'm curious if any of the major "Pro" companies are making requests. Particularly Digital Rapids since I loathe their internal h264.I'm not going to mention any until they sign (at which point I'll ask them specifically whether they want me to mention them or not). Most probably will be fine, though there may be a company which wants to stay anonymous; if so, their contributions will just be marked as anonymous.

We have at least one 「Large Notable Company Everyone Has Heard Of」 interested.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Use x264 VFW in Digital Rapids, it works reasonably well :)

Derek

[a451guy451]

Thanks! (Both of you)

[iwod]

I hope that includes Apple.... or Microsoft.

[HJRodrigo]

I could see both doing it, but Apple seems more likely. We know apple has been looking at Dark Shikari's blog and apple already uses open source stuff like webkit. I think Microsoft is fine with using other people's technology/code like GIANT AntiSpyware and NCSA Mosaic browser, but to my knowledge they don't seem to use any open source technology/code (Maybe for security reasons).