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.
