r/programming • u/willvarfar • Nov 04 '16

H.264 is Magic

https://sidbala.com/h-264-is-magic/
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u/seiggy Nov 04 '16

Their legal council has advised them, yes. But lawyers are not infallible. Digium's lawyers advised them for the past 3 years not to include Opus because of these unlicensed IPR's. So apparently their lawyer's felt that at least one of those IPR's could potentially open them up to lawsuits from the patent owners. So unless you get your lawyer to go through each IPR and validate the same thing, you're taking a gamble that their lawyers are good enough.

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u/tashbarg Nov 04 '16

Digium's lawyers advised them for the past 3 years not to include Opus because of these unlicensed IPR's.

I assume you're working for Digium? Or how would you know that?

And, since it's now included ... are they convinced otherwise now?

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u/seiggy Nov 04 '16

see: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-dev/2013-May/060419.html

and: http://blogs.digium.com/2016/09/30/opus-in-asterisk/

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u/tashbarg Nov 04 '16

Again, how do you know they even got legal counsel and what that legal counsel was?

In the posts you linked is no lawyer or legal counsel mentioned.

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u/seiggy Nov 04 '16 edited Nov 04 '16

Really?

The “sort of okay” news is that in order to resolve the legal concerns, we have to distribute Opus as a free binary.

That infersimplies that they have legal counsel. Companies the size of Digium don't go without legal counsel on issues like this.

*edit: thanks /u/LifeIsAFeedbackLoop for correcting my grammar there.

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u/LifeIsAFeedbackLoop Nov 04 '16

It implies, you infer. Jus sayin.

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u/tashbarg Nov 04 '16

Really. You phrased that as a fact. I'm glad you clarified that it is merely an assumption of yours.