- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@hsivonen.fi>
- Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2013 17:12:48 +0300
- To: Matt Ivie <matt.ivie@gmail.com>
- Cc: John Foliot <john@foliot.ca>, piranna@gmail.com, Andreas Kuckartz <A.Kuckartz@ping.de>, public-restrictedmedia@w3.org
On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 2:32 AM, Matt Ivie <matt.ivie@gmail.com> wrote: > Being Free Software and being covered by a patent are two different things. By confusing the two matters you're making more downstream confusion as a result. That's like saying that being Free Software and having keys certified by the root of trust of a given DRM scheme are two different things. I think John has a point. x264 despite being under a Free Software license—GPL even—does not come (in all countries) with full freedoms one would expect from Free Software under the definition of Free Software because there are third-party encumbrances. (Even freedom 0 fails in some cases! Not due to restrictions imposed by the authors of the program, of course.) (Yes, I’m aware the the FSF’s Free Software Directory lists software that implements H.264 as long as the copyright license is a blessed one and excludes Firefox, which made a bona fide attempt at avoiding the restrictions on software freedom arising from H.264. I personally think that’s backwards.) -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@hsivonen.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Wednesday, 3 July 2013 14:13:18 UTC