[anigbrowl]

Film/video post-production guy here. Agree about software patents but I'm not so sure about the licensing in this case. The thing is, h.264 really is very very good at what it does.

I don't think it's so bad to reward that with a license fee, and the patent administrators are benign dictators. There are lots of exceptions to allow startups to use it, there are sub-inflation caps on the fee increases, and the maximum license fee per hardware device is 20 cents. Online is a bit more complex but still very cheap. full terms here: http://www.mpegla.com/avc/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf

On principle, I lean towards a totally free software solution. But pragmatically, this is a very fair approach to administering a patent for a technology which delivers a lot of value, and and I think h.264 will persist for that reason.

[mellis]

Is it really so cheap? If so, it seems that it should be possible to create a mechanism which could cover these fees for open-source projects. Perhaps someone like Mozilla or Canonical or other open-source advocates could create a fund for such things? In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to pay licensing fees for this. But this seems a small price to pay for a standard video codec. Is there anything like this for .mp3 support?

[thristian]

The problem with patent licensing and open-source software is that patent license agreements are usually geared towards shipping physical items (such as DVD players, etc.) Commercial, proprietary software tries very much to behave like physical items (one single producer, building and shipping items to to customers) so patent terms like "20c per unit" work quite well.

Open-source, on the other hand, has a most unphysical habit of proliferating without the original creator's involvement. If Canonical promises to pay 20c per CD they ship, and 10% of those CDs are imaged and torrented and downloaded and burnt and re-imaged and re-shared all over the web, nobody knows how many "units" are out there, and there's no reasonable way Canonical (or Mozilla, or any other prospective licensee) can comply with any patent license more complicated than "do whatever you want".

[wmf]

it seems that it should be possible to create a mechanism which could cover these fees for open-source projects. Perhaps someone like Mozilla or Canonical or other open-source advocates could create a fund for such things?

Since the fees are capped, some organization could just pay the cap, distribute a "free" codec, and write the cost off as a marketing expense. Mozilla can afford to do this, but refuses on principle.

Is there anything like this for .mp3 support?

Fluendo distributes a "free" MP3 decoder; they pay the license fee on behalf of users.

[anigbrowl]

I don't remember what the mp3 situation is - it's probably on Wikipedia. Your fund idea is pretty good, but if it's client-side chances are you can either reference graphics card hardware on newer systems or be exempted on older ones (which might not be an issue anyway, as it's quite processor-intensive and doesn't run that well on older CPUs). You can email them on the website if you dig around.