I began to wonder how long it will take for someone to begin working on a fork of Firefox which would include support for h264. I have already seen patches for both DirectShow and GStreamer backends, so I'd guess it's not that hard technically.
What we need is a catchy domain name, some marketing and a few devs and the spice shall flow again.
VLC is one of the most popular open source programs in the world. Over 100 million copies have been downloaded since the 1.0 release, with an all time download count of nearly 400 million.
They support not only H.264--which has a relatively reasonable, low-cost licensing system--but many formats whose licensing models are absurdly overpriced and unreasonable (e.g. MP3). And furthermore, VLC not only supports open standards like H.264, but also plenty of proprietary formats, like VP6, MSMPEG4, and Real Video.
Regarding Patentable Inventions, the second paragraph of article 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) states:
The following (..) shall not be regarded as [patentable] inventions: scientific theories and mathematical methods; (...) programs for computers (...).
The VideoLAN project only provides software, i.e. "programs for computers". Those are outside the scope of patentability. Hence there is not need to obtain any patent licenses for VideoLAN software within the European Union. In other venues, please check any applicable law.
Please note however that the combination of software with hardware may yield something patentable. As such, if you do make a hardware product with VideoLAN software, you may conceivably need to obtain patent licenses for the hardware parts.
What licensing fees? h264? Well I'm not entirely sure how, but lots of FOSS projects support h264, most prominently x264 and ffmpeg, and software building upon them. Just do it like they do.
... or just use system codecs.
besides I'd guess Google would be happy to have h264-supporting Firefox, and end this farce, so getting some kind of sponsorship from big G wouldn't be that improbable.
Apple (QT) and Microsoft (DirectShow) pay the license fees when they distribute their Operating Systems.
Nobody gives a shit about distributing the x264 source code, and only the fosstards even have a hiccup about distributing binaries, especially from hosts outside the US. Ubuntu may not ship with the gstreamer plugin, but it does prompt you to download it the first time it's asked for by an application.
- The 'fosstards' built and shared a good deal of the ecosystem on which the Internet you are using runs.
- A large chunk of the rest is directly or indirectly enabled, possible or cheaper thanks to them.
- Every one I have met in person has been polite about their goals, and while they base them on fundamental principles I don't quite agree with, their reasoning as based on those principles is rock solid.
As such I think they deserve a little more respect than being called names, especially here. When was the last time you saw a start-up that used no FOSS software?
The 'fosstards' aren't generally writing the Free Software I use -- they're hanging out in debian-legal and harassing people over petty imagined issues and doing more than anyone else to promote strong intellectual property rights (especially Software Patents: you don't weaken something by anal-retentively respecting it).
The vast majority of people writing GPL software do not align with the FSF's ideology, the GPL2 is just the most practical for their needs. Note how noone outside their core commune has switched to the GPL3, and how noone actually deeds the copyright for their random projects to the FSF like they recommend in the license text?
The only hard-GNU software I (and most others here) really use are GCC, coreutils, bash, and readline. Incidentally I'm hoping to be able to ditch all the first three in the near future for quality reasons mostly borne of FSF-pigheadedness (though I would like to swap out readline when that's the only GPL lib in a program). If I switch back to a Mac I'll be able to use better alternatives for all of them quite soon.
Comments
I began to wonder how long it will take for someone to begin working on a fork of Firefox which would include support for h264. I have already seen patches for both DirectShow and GStreamer backends, so I'd guess it's not that hard technically.
What we need is a catchy domain name, some marketing and a few devs and the spice shall flow again.
Who's going to pay the licensing fees? If you fork, you probably don't get access to the Google money spigot.
VLC is one of the most popular open source programs in the world. Over 100 million copies have been downloaded since the 1.0 release, with an all time download count of nearly 400 million.
They support not only H.264--which has a relatively reasonable, low-cost licensing system--but many formats whose licensing models are absurdly overpriced and unreasonable (e.g. MP3). And furthermore, VLC not only supports open standards like H.264, but also plenty of proprietary formats, like VP6, MSMPEG4, and Real Video.
They don't pay a cent to anyone.
VLC's faq should give you some answer :
Regarding Patentable Inventions, the second paragraph of article 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) states:
The VideoLAN project only provides software, i.e. "programs for computers". Those are outside the scope of patentability. Hence there is not need to obtain any patent licenses for VideoLAN software within the European Union. In other venues, please check any applicable law.Please note however that the combination of software with hardware may yield something patentable. As such, if you do make a hardware product with VideoLAN software, you may conceivably need to obtain patent licenses for the hardware parts.
What licensing fees? h264? Well I'm not entirely sure how, but lots of FOSS projects support h264, most prominently x264 and ffmpeg, and software building upon them. Just do it like they do.
... or just use system codecs.
besides I'd guess Google would be happy to have h264-supporting Firefox, and end this farce, so getting some kind of sponsorship from big G wouldn't be that improbable.
Apple (QT) and Microsoft (DirectShow) pay the license fees when they distribute their Operating Systems.
Nobody gives a shit about distributing the x264 source code, and only the fosstards even have a hiccup about distributing binaries, especially from hosts outside the US. Ubuntu may not ship with the gstreamer plugin, but it does prompt you to download it the first time it's asked for by an application.
Sorry, my US bias is showing. I totally forgot about the "screw patents and just ship it from Europe" solution.
- The 'fosstards' built and shared a good deal of the ecosystem on which the Internet you are using runs.
- A large chunk of the rest is directly or indirectly enabled, possible or cheaper thanks to them.
- Every one I have met in person has been polite about their goals, and while they base them on fundamental principles I don't quite agree with, their reasoning as based on those principles is rock solid.
As such I think they deserve a little more respect than being called names, especially here. When was the last time you saw a start-up that used no FOSS software?
The 'fosstards' aren't generally writing the Free Software I use -- they're hanging out in debian-legal and harassing people over petty imagined issues and doing more than anyone else to promote strong intellectual property rights (especially Software Patents: you don't weaken something by anal-retentively respecting it).
The vast majority of people writing GPL software do not align with the FSF's ideology, the GPL2 is just the most practical for their needs. Note how noone outside their core commune has switched to the GPL3, and how noone actually deeds the copyright for their random projects to the FSF like they recommend in the license text?
The only hard-GNU software I (and most others here) really use are GCC, coreutils, bash, and readline. Incidentally I'm hoping to be able to ditch all the first three in the near future for quality reasons mostly borne of FSF-pigheadedness (though I would like to swap out readline when that's the only GPL lib in a program). If I switch back to a Mac I'll be able to use better alternatives for all of them quite soon.
Any stats to back up your wild claims and non-sense assumptions?