Cisco plans to open-source H.264 code, widen support for web-based video chat

[muriel moscardini]

hello,

the Cisco announcement is great and is really interesting to follow up.

Our understanding at Fluendo, as licensee of many patent holders like 
MPEGLA would be the following.
(Please take it as our understanding, we are all still waiting for more 
details about this)

1. Cisco has announced they open their H264 codec under BSD license, and 
provide the sources to everyone, without asking for any fee.

2. Then on the other side, they apparently will provide also a binary of 
the same together with the MPEGLA patent license, at no fee either. This 
is possible as Cisco apparently decided to pay upfront the annual cap 
for H264, for this year and the following (which represents more that 
10M of $ a year). The condition is to download the soft from their 
facilities.

Which means
- anyone wanting to use their H264 can do it, take the source and, we 
suppose, do everything allowed by BSD (permissive license, you can 
modify and even release a new version under a proprietary license) with 
no other restriction. Let's see when it is released.

- with the binary, for any application requesting H264, it is possible 
to use the binary, push the user to download directly H264 in Cisco 
premises the H264 binary and so the user will be running H264 licensed.

Warning: normally as far as we know the MPEGLA patent licenses this 
should not allow people to take the the soft and resell it budnled. 
Apparently the conditions for the binary is that it has to be downloaded 
from Cisco web.

We will follow this closely together with our legal too, as we believe 
these are great actions when possible. At Fluendo we did that some years 
ago with our MP3 decoder. We opened it under MIT license, we paid 
upfront Thomson patent for Desktop use, and we distribute it for free on 
our web including the Thomson license (grab it on www.fluendo.com). But 
for any commercial distribution, an agreement is still needed.

I hope it helps

regards

Muriel Paumier-Moscardini
CEO
Fluendo Influencing the multimedia world
New York, USA & Barcelona, SPAIN
Mobile: +1 917 293 5377
united States: +1 646 290 5176
Spain: +34 933 175 153
www.fluendo.com <http://www.fluendo.com/>

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On 11/1/13 3:06 AM, elio francesconi wrote:
>
> Dear all,
> I want to share with you this important news to know your opinion.
> Reading briefly this article it seems that Cisco, the codec's owner 
> don't want royalties anymore.
> What does it means, pratically?
> Thanks
> Elio
>
> http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/30/cisco-plans-to-open-source-h-264-code-for-webrtc/?ncid=rss_truncated
>
>
>
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> gstreamer-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/gstreamer-devel

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