[Ffmpeg-devel] When is planned to add ogg Theora output in ffmpeg?

[jkoleszar at on2.com]

> On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 04:13:29PM -0400, John Koleszar wrote:
>> Rich Felker wrote:
>> >
>> > It's not. This is yet another one of On2's lies. If you don't already
>> > know On2 is a very VERY bad company.
>>
>> Nonsense. There are plenty of "very VERY bad" companies out there, and
>> On2 isn't one of them.
>
> Then please tell us what you call a company that threatens free software
> developers when they implement their proprietary formats and has their
> lawyers send out nastygrams to me for putting libvp62 in my homedir?
>
> I'm very curious to hear your position on this...
>

We don't believe that any free software developer implemented our
proprietary format. We believe that a free software developer published
our implementation of our proprietary format. As a public company, we need
to take all possible measures to protect our intellectual property. We
need to take action to prevent the distribution of our code that we
believe was illegally obtained or in the very least obtained in
contravention of our license. Similarly, the open source community takes
every possible measure to protect its intellectual property when it finds
that a commercial company has violated the community's chosen licensing
terms.

The difference between the two, is that we used lawyers to send the
message to the people we felt to be in violation. Now nobody loves to be
on the recieving end of anything from a lawyer, but we're a company of
engineers, and we should be spending our day doing engineering things, not
chasing our code around the net. As self-appointed liason to this
particular open source community, maybe I should have sent something
informally to give a heads up and clarify what was going on. I appologize
for that.

I know that the opensource community deeply respects copyright issues, and
I don't think that anyone here wants to knowingly use stolen code. We
respect the hard work of the opensource community by honoring
contributors' copyrights and chosen licensing terms, and in return we
expect the community to show us that same respect. I know that there's
been a call for us to prove that the code is ours and that we're not just
upset that someone cracked the nut so to speak. We're evaluating the best
way to do that. But I also think that the person who published this, if it
were in fact legit, would share an equal or even greater burden to prove
that this is a legitimate implementation. Where are his notes? The code
doesn't even have comments. (save {return; //RETURN!!!!}) Does it not
strike you as suspicious that a basically flawless implementaion of a
fairly complex library shows up from an otherwise unknown developer
overnight with no evidence of engineering work whatsoever?

As a longtime member of the OSS community myself, I feel like the company
is trying to go about resolving this in the best way possible.

John