Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop

[tridge at samba.org]

NoiseEHC,

 > Sure, using Ogg over MP3 is totally okay, since it is not only free but 
 > better than MP3. But as others said all the free video codecs are crap 
 > compared to commercial ones. So my question: is there any reason that 
 > the OLPC cannot license one good quality codec for ~10 cents? (Not sure 
 > that it should be H.264 but anything else which runs with adequate speed 
 > on the XO, and has VideoLAN support.)

Depending on the license of the application that is loading the codec,
it may be a license violation to license the patent. For example, if
the application is GPL, then patent licensing is not an option.

We could ask the SFLC to confirm if anyone is interested (I'm sure
Eben Moglen would be happy to give a more complete answer), but I'd be
surprised if they didn't agree,

It also would be a community divider. It would mean all the free
images (for qemu etc) would have to be different from the real X0
images. Not good from a QA point of view.

Plus, I suspect many people on this list hate patents just as much as
I do and don't want to pay patent fees on principle :-)

Cheers, Tridge