Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop

[tridge at samba.org]

Hi Rob,

 >    I'm on vacation this week, but I'm very strongly considering finding 
 > a safe host far away where I can stick a Gnash build for the XO that 
 > fully works, as that's probably the easiest fix. I sure wish Gnash could 
 > be distributed to support these codecs, but changing US patent laws 
 > seems a huge project.

The other option is to write implementations of the codecs that avoid
the patents. Whether that is possible depends on the exact wording of
the patent, and sometimes it takes a few weeks working with a good
patent attorney to work out exactly what the patent really
says. Sometimes it just isn't possible.

We really need a open project to do patent analysis of this kind and
determine which of these key patents (not just codecs, but also other
important blocking patents) can be avoided, and which ones are too
tied to the format to avoid. Perhaps the OLPC project would provide a
good bit of motivation for people to do this type of work?

Cheers, Tridge