iLBC codec sources status - legal - Fedora mailing-lists

23 Nov 2011


      Hello All!
The legal status of iLBC codec (which has some advantages over other
speech codecs) prevented us from inclusion its sources into Fedora
repository. We even were forced to modify original tarballs for
several VoIP software projects to remove its sources before uploading
to the Fedora packaging repository.
Fortunately Google had bought Global IP Sound company, the original
author of iLBC and several months ago they released WebRTC project
under free license which contains several codecs (and ILBC among
them). Unfortunately it's not an easy task to properly package
software from Google (as usual), so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting
for proper support for iLBC codec in the nearest future.
So current situation with iLBC looks quite complicated to me. We have
old sources stripped from RFC text which were licensed under non-free
custom license and were included in a lot of other VoIP projects as
is. Also we have new modified sources released by Google under free
license (within WebRTC) with somewhat different API (none of the
existing VoIP software is compatible with them AFAIC). Google
explicitly states that iLBC now available under the same license as
other WebRTC parts but I'm not sure what's the status of old sources.
*My* *question* *is* - can we at least stop stripping of iLBC sources
from packages? I will definitely ask FESCo later which is in charge of
making technical decisions regarding unbundling libraries, however
before asking technical questions I'd like to hear some legal advises.
* http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3951.txt
* http://www.webrtc.org/ilbc-freeware
* http://code.google.com/p/webrtc/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Fsrc%2Fmodules%2...
* http://www.soft-switch.org/downloads/voipcodecs/ilbc-0.0.2.tar.gz
* http://nucleo.fedorapeople.org/rpms/mediastreamer/SPECS/ilbc.spec
-- 
With best regards, Peter Lemenkov.