[Fedora-legal-list] Re: Mesa patented codecs approval

[Neal Gompa]

On Sun, Sep 25, 2022 at 9:06 AM Robert-André Mauchin <zebob.m(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  Hello,
>
>  So recently Mesa disabled by default patented codecs. They added an option to re-enable
> it
>  with -Dvideo-codecs=h264dec,h264enc,h265dec,h265enc,vc1dec
>
>  Dave Airlie elected to not include this line in:
>
> https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/mesa/c/94ef544b3f2125912dfbff4c6ef373f...
>
>  because "we don't have legal approval for this".
>
>  Could it be waived by legal to be re-enabled? Not having basic h264 decoding is quite
>  taxing. And we all already pay patents when buying the video card.
>  
This assumption is wrong. I can't get into specifics, but there are
plenty of legal games that are played by hardware vendors to avoid
paying those fees.

Others have mentioned this in the corresponding devel threat too[1].

As a distribution, we have to ensure we don't have a way to enable a
complete codepath for such codecs to avoid the legal risks. There are
a number of ways to approach this, but it's important that Fedora
itself cannot provide a complete path to access hardware acceleration
for these codecs either.


[1]:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail].o...




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