[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Dynamic plugins loading

[Luca Barbato]

On 11/06/2010 02:22 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 1:33 PM, Jean-Baptiste Kempf <jb at videolan.org> wrote:
>> On Sat, Nov 06, 2010 at 11:37:35AM +0200, Felipe Contreras wrote :
>>> H.264 is _clearly_ owned by MPEG LA who claims to have the patents. You
>>> distribute FFmpeg as-is without paying them, you risk being sued by
>>> them.
>>
>>> Menus, double-click, etc. _might_ be owned by patents, but it's not
>>> clear who, if any, would sue Fedora, and if the patent would be valid.
>>> Besides, legally speaking it's better to not know you are violating a
>>> patent, than knowingly do that, which wouldn't fly for H.264.
>>
>> _clearly_ vs _might_... Seriously?
>> So who decides when it is clear and when it is not? People from Fedora?
>> This is beyond ridiculous.
> 
> H.264 is a standard, that is clear. double-click is not.

cue HIG guidelines from apple microsoft and whatever...

> You cannot
> implement a standard by mistake, or claim you came up with the idea on
> your own; that would be ridiculous.

Same could be said for human interaction guidelines, there is plenty of
books of ergonomics, not just signal processing.

(Patenting something you can find on a textbook since ages should be
impossible, isn't it?)

> User interface interactions are totally different, who knows how many
> are in any given system, and it's not that easy to find if there's a
> patent for any one of them; it's easy to claim you didn't know it was
> patented (thus have a reduced punishment).

Clearly you never ever look at how a codec works or which are it's
constituents or how ffmpeg lays functions in directories ^^;

> Plus, even if the patent claim exists, it might be invalid.

Same said for h264...
> It's easy to come up with the
> double-click idea, or the might be previous work on that. Who cares?

It's easy to come up with ideas of using idct, filter banks, wavelets
and such if you are into signal theory, there are even previous works
about it, many.

> Certainly nobody is going to sue Fedora for that, nor it's like there
> a freer unencumbered alternative to double-click, or that it's patent
> really worth caring about.

single click?

lu

-- 

Luca Barbato
Gentoo/linux
http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero