Fluendo retracing the steps of Novell
Tuesday, January 16. 2007, 22:50
Fluendo, a company working with gstreamer, recently announced the availability of commercial, binary codecs for some multimedia formats. They list WMA, WMV, MMS, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, ASF and MP3.
Now, this raises some interesting questions for me: Pretty much all those codecs are already well supported by free implementations, ffmpeg and others. The only exception I can see is WMA3, which is still unsupported by free alternatives, but rarely used. Even the latest Windows Media Video, based on VC-1, has recently gained support by ffmpeg. So from a technical viewpoint, the codecs are basically of very low importance.
The issue that they don't mention in their press release is probably: We provide you with commercial codecs and save you from patent threads. Now that raises the question of software patents. For europe it's very doubtful if the covered patents are legal at all - as we know the EU has rejected the »legalization« of software patents back in 2005, keeping the uncertain situation we had before.
In strategic considerations for the free software community, this case is probably similar to the Novell-Microsoft deal - and raises the same problems Bruce Perens pointed out in his Open Letter: If there's a »licensed« way to use MPEG and other patented formats in linux - then this might weaken the position of projects fighting software patent threats against free software.
So, if you think software patents should be abadoned (which every free software developer should do), raise your voice against questionable patent agreements with those companies earning their money from software patents.
Now, this raises some interesting questions for me: Pretty much all those codecs are already well supported by free implementations, ffmpeg and others. The only exception I can see is WMA3, which is still unsupported by free alternatives, but rarely used. Even the latest Windows Media Video, based on VC-1, has recently gained support by ffmpeg. So from a technical viewpoint, the codecs are basically of very low importance.
The issue that they don't mention in their press release is probably: We provide you with commercial codecs and save you from patent threads. Now that raises the question of software patents. For europe it's very doubtful if the covered patents are legal at all - as we know the EU has rejected the »legalization« of software patents back in 2005, keeping the uncertain situation we had before.
In strategic considerations for the free software community, this case is probably similar to the Novell-Microsoft deal - and raises the same problems Bruce Perens pointed out in his Open Letter: If there's a »licensed« way to use MPEG and other patented formats in linux - then this might weaken the position of projects fighting software patent threats against free software.
So, if you think software patents should be abadoned (which every free software developer should do), raise your voice against questionable patent agreements with those companies earning their money from software patents.
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I totally agree! it's also sad to see that there are other Free Software "advocates" like Dave Neary (http://blogs.gnome.org/view/bolsh/2007/01/16/0) who actually think that Fluendo does good to Free Software by releasing this:
Au contraire, I think it's great that a company is offering for-money sale of commercial codecs - it's infinitely preferable to "free" codecs that people are downloading and using - often in non-compliance with the GPL ("but that's OK, we download them separately, and we're not redistributing the aggregate work").
Beside win32codecs being supported by more than just mplayer (xine, vlc, gstreamer itself), I think it's way more useful for Free Software the effort done by FFmpeg developers, who reimplemented a lot of codecs already, and now supports also VC-1 and WMV-3 as you noted.
You want to do good for Free Software? Support FFmpeg, rather than despise win32codes and support proprietary codecs of other sorts.
Au contraire, I think it's great that a company is offering for-money sale of commercial codecs - it's infinitely preferable to "free" codecs that people are downloading and using - often in non-compliance with the GPL ("but that's OK, we download them separately, and we're not redistributing the aggregate work").
Beside win32codecs being supported by more than just mplayer (xine, vlc, gstreamer itself), I think it's way more useful for Free Software the effort done by FFmpeg developers, who reimplemented a lot of codecs already, and now supports also VC-1 and WMV-3 as you noted.
You want to do good for Free Software? Support FFmpeg, rather than despise win32codes and support proprietary codecs of other sorts.
In the USA, we have software patents, and there is pretty much no hope of changing the law in the near future. That means we can't use ffmpeg-based anything in a commercial product without getting sued. Using only open formats is not an alternative - there is too much content in mpeg and wmv form. So given the choice of
1. not releasing a product;
2. using windows; and
3. using Linux with Fluendo codecs
you can see that #3 is the least bad alternative.
1. not releasing a product;
2. using windows; and
3. using Linux with Fluendo codecs
you can see that #3 is the least bad alternative.
#3
alex
on
2007-01-17 01:22
Totally agree with Alex (#3). I wanted to sell a home theater computer with Linux in Australia. Without the Fluendo codecs I can't do sh...t. So, I choose the lest of evil and happily pay for their codecs.
#3.1
linuxoid
on
2007-01-22 03:02
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There is an open letter from Bruce Perens to Novell about the recent Microsoft deal that I haven’t seen before. You can (and should!) sign it here. (Thx Hanno) ...
Tracked: Jan 21, 14:32