MPEG-4 support? (licensing dragons).

Jim Gettys jg at laptop.org
Wed Nov 1 13:58:11 UTC 2006


Gstreamer was deliberately written to avoid these problems: net result
is that you can use a legal, paid up MP3 binary codec (for which the
source is also available) from Fluendo (though you still have to deal
with signing paper with Fluendo to redistribute, according to
Fraunhofer's license).  It is LGPL, with some sort of exception worked
out, that I didn't find in cursory exampination.

Real's Helix framework is probably also on sound legal footing, but has
little uptake it the open source and free software community. I haven't
checked it's terms.

We're using gstreamer on the OLPC system.
                               Regards,
                                   - Jim


On Tue, 2006-10-31 at 10:50 -0800, Andreas Raab wrote:
> Hi Jim -
> 
> Thanks for the pointing out the issues. My current inquiry is actually 
> unrelated to OLPC but since there might be some overlap it's useful to 
> know these issues. What libraries/frameworks would you recommend using? 
> You mention GStreamer, how mature is it?
> 
> Thanks,
>    - Andreas
> 
> Jim Gettys wrote:
> > Here be licensing dragons, folks, at a minimum when you go from one
> > codec to N codecs.
> > 
> > Be very careful on the selection of multimedia codec frameworks, as
> > they get you into licensing hades more often than not, and many people
> > don't see it coming.
> > 
> > Here's the problem:
> > 
> > You want to plug in a commercial licensed codec into a codec framework,
> > to get at a patented algorithm (of which there are many in the media
> > area, and software patents cannot, unfortunately, just be ignored,
> > despite most of our beliefs the current system is badly broken)  
> > 
> > But the license of the framework's codec interface has terms that
> > conflict with the commercial codec's license terms (typically around
> > patent issues).
> > 
> > Net result: no legal combination.
> > 
> > This may be ok from an end user's point of view when they put their
> > system together out of pieces, as they usually ignore the legal
> > problems, but it is a showstopper for re-distributors (e.g. Linux
> > distributions, OLPC downstream consumers), who might like/need things to
> > work "out of the box" for the end user.
> > 
> > As an example of lack of care about this is the Xine player libraries,
> > which would have been perfectly adequate several years before the
> > gstreamer library was built.  Gstreamer was explicitly written and care
> > taken in its licensing to allow for such combinations to be possible,
> > and arguably would not have been necessary had the licensing issue been
> > thought through in advance (it was infeasible to get Xine's libraries
> > re-licensed, due to the number of contributors).
> > 
> > I have no information about mplayer's licensing situation.
> > 
> > Once burned (actually, free software has been burned multiple times on
> > this topic), twice shy.  Please be *very* careful in this area so you
> > (and we) don't get burned too.
> >                                     Best regards,
> >                                        - Jim
> > 
> 
-- 
Jim Gettys
One Laptop Per Child





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