Re:H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)
by p_l on Monday July 06, 2020 @10:26AM
(#23748226)
As others mentioned, VP8, VP9 and AV1 all are patent encumbered - they just happen to have licenses that are royalty-free and as someone mentioned, include retaliation clauses which help fighting off submarine patents - but that's essentially a possibly high-stakes game of chicken.
[ Parent
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While they are patent-encumbered in the strictest sense of the word, they are not as aggressively licensed as H.266 -- which is what GP was lamenting. Licensing H.266 under the GPL(v3) wouldn't erase the existence of the patents and it would still be "patent-encumbered" in the same sense that VP8/9 and AV1 are.
And retaliation clauses are present in basically every free software license that has clauses dealing with patents (including Apache-2.0).
A big part is in how expensive can you make said retaliation.
I'm more and more fond of calling it all a big game of chicken, a MAD without nukes,
Re:H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)
by craftinator on Monday July 06, 2020 @12:24PM
(#23749495)
Hah I love this analogy! Guess that's societal progress for you; we use currency to replace munitions.
Re:H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)
by RBURBURXEIVG3KO on Monday July 06, 2020 @11:15AM
(#23748789)
Wouldn't Apache 2 be a better license for this since it is explicit on patents?
GPL is the example GP used, which is why I referenced it. It's not really important what free software license it would be (though GPLv3 does have an entire section (s11) which is all about patents -- that's why it's compatible with Apache-2.0).