OpenH264 in Fedora

[Björn Persson]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>Cisco has announced that they will be releasing an implementation of a
>BSD licensed H.264 (baseline profile) encoder and decoder, along with
>offering download of binaries of it under Cisco's licensing umbrella:
>http://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/open-source-h-264-removes-barriers-webrtc/

Attempting a comparison:

X264 source is available with a free copyright license (GPLv2+).
Cisco says that OpenH264 source will be available with a free copyright
license (BSD).

X264 source does not come with a patent license.
Cisco says that OpenH264 source will not come with a patent license.

X264 binaries are available gratis, for example from RPM Fusion.
Cisco says that OpenH264 binaries will be available gratis from Cisco.

X264 binaries do not come with a patent license.
Cisco says that OpenH264 binaries will come with a patent license – as
long as Cisco continues to pay the yearly license fee.

Fedora mustn't have third-party repositories like RPM Fusion enabled by
default. Users must consciously configure them.
Therefore Fedora mustn't download Cisco's binaries by default. It will
have to be something that users must consciously configure.

So what's the big deal? If Cisco goes through with this, then there
will be one more free but patent-encumbered implementation. Another
implementation doesn't hurt, but I don't see how it solves any
fundamental problems. The only news is that Cisco will hand out blobs
with gratis patent licenses for some time. Establishing a standard
based on the assumption that Cisco will continue doing that
indefinitely seems like a bad idea.

-- 
Björn Persson

Sent from my computer.
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