[ Thanks to Penguin
for this link. ]
“While the “free for web use” claims for H.264 by
MPEG-LA sound great and have deceived many commentators, they are
nothing new and contain no good news for open source software.“At the end of last week, the MPEG-LA consortium announced they
were extending the arrangement whereby they allow ‘web uses’ of the
patents reading on the H.264 standard that they administer for
their members to be licensed without charge. The arrangement, which
runs in five-year periods, has now been extended to the expiration
of the patents in the pool.“At first sight, this sounds great. Headlines have popped up all
over the place which might lead one to believe that everything is
now fine in the area of video streaming on the internet and we can
all proceed without fear of having video taxed. But I’d suggest
leaving the champagne corked for now.”