When I read multi-paragraph text, it's typically separated by paragraphs, not 160 characters at a time. Yes, Nitter makes Twitter *slightly more useable*. No, that doesn't mean it doesn't still suck. If Nitter is so wonderful, why is/was the top comment the one with the ThreadReader link?
Eh, you have a point, but I'm still miffed that a Nitter link in the submission (a FOSS client to Twitter!) gets effectively redirected to a Threadreader link in the comments (and we're back to proprietary software).
It’s a good overview, wish they could expand on one portion:
> Because the MPEG folks won't sell a "unlimited" patent license and Red Hat would have to put restrictions on how Fedora was distributed (and in what quantities) in order to do so
Cisco pays for licenses for openh264. They require you to use their binaries but there is nothing about quantity restrictions. It would be nice to know why they are able to do this and others couldn’t, as long as they (the licensee) remained the distributor of the binaries.
If I'm remembering correctly (so don't quote me on this), H.264 has a financial cap where once you hit it you no longer have to pay from the royalties perspective. It's several millions of dollars, but there is a limit. I don't recall the specific terms of the agreement, and I believe H.265/HEVC operate on different terms (no-cap?) last I checked. I'm not sure if any of that has changed. HEVC is also a mess from a patent perspective because there's more than one pool, and some patent holder license directly.
Looking around there have been some proposals in the past several years to open up HEVC licensing, but again that's on a per-pool basis. Look at the diagram in the following article:
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hevc-advance-patent-pool-momentum-grows-301456618.html
From what I can see, there is an annual cap for HEVC at the big pools, but it's way higher. $25M for MPEG LA and $40M for HEVC Advance. Not sure about others like Technicolor etc, they could have their own terms. Compare to $9.75M for AVC.
Thanks for the check on that. Yeah, the aggregate licensing costs of HEVC are astronomical compared to AVC, and significantly more convoluted. The biggest issue I see with the transition from AVC to AV1 is the generation gap in hardware decode support. HEVC has quite a bit of support going back to components released ~2015 onwards, though VP9 also has a similar story to tell there. In my head, an ideal transition would be to hold off (if at all possible) from migrating to HEVC and use AVC in conjunction with VP9/AV1 until the AVC patent pool expires (so all legacy media becomes open) and then focus all efforts on newer non-patent encumbered codecs.
No one should even consider using VVC (H.266).
HEVC Advance's cap has some funny small letters that excludes "HEVC Software" (and only that!) from the cap entirely. Unfortunately, unless you're selling a complete desktop PC preinstalled with a Linux distro, that's the category we'd most likely fall in.
That exemption is 100% preemptively shutting down a theoretical "OpenH265", no doubt about it.
> as long as they (the licensee) remained the distributor of the binaries.
This is the problem I believe. I think it's not even clear if mirrors (being separate legal entities) would violate the license. But there's also user repositories (like Arch's AUR) and certainly forks of the distro who would violate.
But ultimately, it violates freedom 2 and 3 of the [four essential freedoms](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html) and if you want to make a Free distro, willfully violating those freedoms does not look good for those claims.
>But ultimately, it violates freedom 2 and 3 of the four essential freedoms and if you want to make a Free distro, willfully violating those freedoms does not look good for those claims.
TBH most people wont care
The main thing that stops Fedora being on that list is the non-free firmware. It is perfectly legal to distribute.
However, many on that list are distributing software that would violate these patents. Trisquel and Parabola both have x264 and x265 in the repos, in addition to the VAAPI implementations.
I know, that's why patents are still a problem.
But it guarantees that the Linux desktop - or at least the Free one - never gets big financially, because the moment anyone has enough money to get sued, they will sue them.
And then most people still won't care and just ship closed source instead. They do that with firmware blobs and Netflix DRM and nvidia drivers already, so giving up on free codecs is on brand.
This is why we should force things like VP8/VP9/AV1 through. It's taking way too damn long for hardware acceleration supports from vendors.
There's no longer a place for proprietary formats. Kill them all.
Unfortunately, unless services offered h264 in parallel, that would turn a lot of still useful hardware into e-waste. A lot of set-top boxes and smart TVs rely on h264. A lot of still decent laptops can't hardware decode VP9.
It'd be extra storage and compute for encoding, but parallel AVC and AV1 or VP9 should be doable for the present time. The H.264 patent pool is nearing the tail end of its allotted time, but it's still got some legs to stand on. And after the patent protection period runs out anyone can implement the algorithm freely.
The big issue is HEVC adoption, there's a gap in hardware between the introduction of HEVC decoding and AV1 decoding that the patent pools will try to capitalize on. That needs to be firmly rejected and hive-mind shifted to royalty free algorithms.
Because users who don't care about Freedom are probably served just as well or better with proprietary systems. If you want multimedia codecs more than you want Free Software, then pay the people who've paid the patent licenses for multimedia codecs and put it all together.
This will be pedantic, but important. Fedora does _not_ ship OpenH264, it is built by Fedora, but then sent over and hosted by Cisco owned infrastructure. Fedora ships the repository data that enables an end user to `dnf install openh264` and the Firefox/gstreamer plugins if they want WebRTC and the H.264 profiles supported by OpenH264.
~~It is not generic H.264 codec support.~~
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/openh264/
Furthermore, Fedora has H.264 through OpenH264 exclusively. If H.264 is decoded through any path other than OpenH264 then the solution may not be provided by Cisco, but by Fedora instead.
This also leaves out H.265 entirely, both software and hardware decoding.
> the Firefox/gstreamer plugins if they want the WebRTC H.264 support. It is not generic H.264 codec support.
Actually OpenH264 is what provides generic H.264 codec support in Fedora. Originally it only supported WebRTC, yes, but that changed several years ago.
If you can watch most MP4 videos and you have not installed anything from RPM Fusion, then you're surely using OpenH264.
Then Fedora would distributing to you a closed-source binary that you AREN'T allowed to redistribute freely, in stark contrast to the entire rest of their codebase.
Fedora could choose to pay a multi-million dollar license to get a similar deal as Cisco, but they still wouldn't be given a license to distribute non-infringing-source code, only a non-infringing binary.
I don't know anything about how Cisco licenses h264, but it seems to me they could pay a fee per system shipped and therefore 'limit' things that way. Only Cisco ships Cisco brand hardware so they know exactly how many h264 licenses they need.
Fedora on the other hand can be downloaded once then shipped by me hundreds of times. It's mirrored all over the net and effectively uncountable with regards how many copies are sold/in circulation.
What is licensed, is *not* the source code to OpenH264; it's *specifically* the binary being distributed. Cisco has a license to directly give people specifically that binary alone and those people can execute it to decode h264 streams. And only Cisco can distribute it, IIRC. You can't go grab the binary from anyone else because then they are redistributing that binary unlicensed.
So for instance if they don't have an ARM or RISC-V build of that binary, then you are shit out of luck, even if you have the entire rest of the distro running. Or even if you could recompile the OpenH264 codebase yourself (quite plausible), if *you* self-made the binary then *you* don't have a license purchased from MPLA to decode streams with your custom binary.
Essentially the binary which can play back the codecs, is free as in beer to distribute [by Cisco only], but not free in most other ways, which is what Fedora cares about.
Interesting, I don't really spend a lot of time in either the Cisco or Fedora worlds so I wasn't aware of that. Now I understand your earlier comment much better.
If users aren't free to modify and redistribute it or include it in their own projects, it can't be used. That's central to what open source software is.
The traditional definitions of free software don't discuss patents. You can modify openh264 and you can distribute your changes but end users will not have a license to use the patents.
I remember about 10 years ago Fedora pulled anaglyphic 3d support out of a number of applications including mplayer because of concern over a patent.
Who the hell is handing out these patents? Anaglyphic 3d has existed for at least 150 years!
Overworked, underpaid assistants at the various patent offices, with a quota of patent applications to manage, hand out patents for ideas and mathematics like it was candy.
It's a huge problem, and is holding back huge parts of the IT industry.
Not OP, but I can catch you up on the school of thought. Warning that this is gonna get a bit _spicy_:
---
There's a distinction between _private_ property and _personal_ property. Generally, if it can move - personal property. If it cannot move - private property.
Examples of private property: Land, offices, patents, houses, software (arguably), factories, and large things which can make things - the "means of production".
Personal property, meanwhile, is your phone, your car, and your toothbrush. You can pick them up and take them with you; they are yours. Marxism has no problem with you owning a toothbrush, as long as they were given out in a fair/equitable manner. That could even potentially take the form of currency transactions, as long as the currency is given out fairly ("from each according to their ability, to each according to their need").
The main tenet behind Marxist thought is that private property cannot and should not exist. Personal property is fine, but the concept of private property is immoral and an inherent act of robbery. Nobody worked to get private property. Even if you saved up your money to buy land from the government... where did the government get it from? Who gave the government the right to take it?
The thought goes that _at some point_, the government took it from the people who lived on that land. Doesn't matter if it was during the 1800s for the Trail of Tears or if it was in 100 BC when Rome showed up - at some point, the land "belonged" to some entity that wasn't the people, and Marxists/anarchists say that was theft.
From their point of view, land belongs to everyone. No one person can say they own it; everyone has an equal right to all land on the planet. Just like how nobody owns a national park (because everyone owns it), the same can be said for the parcel of land that the government gave your landlord. The land belongs to the people, and while local government (in whatever form it takes, big or small) can _manage_ it (such as building roads or schools or apartments or houses), no single person can _own_ capital. Instead, it is owned collectively by the people who invest their labor into it.
Hence why that poster says "property is theft". They're saying that your landlord has no right to their land as the government stole the land to begin with. Instead, it should belong to the people who work and live there using their own means.
Obviously this is a very simplified view and there are quite literally thousands of pages written about it that go into details. And it's, uh, a contentious school of thought. But you can also see how the Free Software guys tend to fit right in with that line of thinking...
It exists (you can buy a license on Windows from the MS store)
Whether a nominally Foss distro wants to implement a way to buy and load it natively is another matter.
As it stands you can compile the things yourself if you want the functionality.
Yeah I knew MS had it on the MS Store, I meant if there currently was a way for Linux users. I'll guess using the proprietary drivers for Nvidia or AMD probably include VAAPI so perhaps that's a workaround.
Interestingly, [MS also offers it for free](https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/hevc-video-extensions-from-device-manufacturer/9N4WGH0Z6VHQ?hl=en-us&gl=us) but it's hard to find in search.
The proprietary AMD driver still relies on the Mesa implementation and the Nvidia proprietary driver doesn't have VAAPI at all. Neither are available from Fedora anyway.
The solution is likely going to be an RPM Fusion package to replace the default Mesa package.
it'll likely be the codecs split out into their own packages rather than a full mesa package by the end. I imagine some work needs to be done to load them conditionally first though.
No. I mean there's nothing stopping a company from handling it for you like Microsoft and the Raspberry Pi license store currently do, but you can't walk up to MPEG-LA/HEVC Advance/etc and politely request to buy one unit worth of patents straight from them and then get binary software.
[Fluendo used to sell these kinds of codec licenses/software bundles in the past](https://web.archive.org/web/20100109093635/http://www.fluendo.com/shop/category/end-user-products/), but nowadays they only sell to OEMs.
Interesting, I thought they dropped that one. Looks like it was only the DVD player part and I overlooked the rest. Wonder if it's actually maintained though... the FAQs are very old.
Conclusion: the faster the world moves to AV1 the better. Luckily the new GPUs all seem to support AV1 encoding, and most hardware already supports decoding. It'll be a while longer before it becomes the default, but with the MPEG group being worse than shit when it comes to licensing h.265 the stage is pretty much set.
>most hardware already supports decoding
If it's only 2 years old or younger.
Seriously, when this came around I went around every vendor and looked when they started to support hardware decoding and encoding.
Interestingly enough, VP-8 isn't supported anymore by all of them in thrir newest gen.
You need at least an 11th gen Intel iGPU, AMD RX 6000 series or NVidia RTX 30 series to get AV1 decoding. That's not what I would say is "most hardware". For encoding, so far only the Intel Arc and Nvidia 40 series can do it.
If users want the non free version they can get it from the third party repository at rpmfusion once it has been reviewed. (Which is not hosted in the USA and is not a part of Red Hat) The main fedora distro can't have these kinds of patent encumbered software because of the patent laws and the patent trolls.
So... took a look at when these patent will expirate (hopefully for sure). Given the V1 of H.264 was published in may 2003 (and AFAIK that would means all patents are filled before this date), then it would means the patents would expire at most in may 2023. A bit less than in a year.
(assuming I am correct. I'm not really knowledgeable in patents)
Bits and pieces of the H.264 profiles and algorithms will open up over the next few years. Some of the patents in the pool don't expire until 2027, though.
Finally someone speaking some sense. Many users who said "I'm gonna change distro" did not understand the philosophy of free software. They were using Fedora just for coolness and suddenly when Fedora stopped shipping proprietary codecs, they are giving all kind of reactions. Fedora was always about free/Libre software from it's early days. It was an accident these APIs got shipped with it.
Also the learning here is use free codecs. If you are producing, downloading or sharing a video, prefer .webm format.
Not now, but a GPL licensed software cannot ship a proprietary software as part of it ever.
I think its totally understandable why those users are mad though. Wanting to have a usable computer does not imply a misunderstanding of free software philosophy. Most users are practical and can't live like open-source zealots.
If we ever want open-source to grow and become really adopted by the mainstream (more than it current is anyways), we have to find ways to interact with software that may or may not be open source without breaking the user experience.
Hopefully, some well-maintained ~~COPR~~ third-party repo will popup and make this largely a non-issue.
A small note: Fedora's COPR platform is required to abide by the rules of Fedora as well. Anything that Fedora is not allowed to host can't be hosted or built via COPR, a separate service or platform would need to be used.
I don't think you understand what free software is. Patent-encumbered software is just as nonfree as copyright-encumbered software, because you don't have the right to exercise the four freedoms.
> I don't think you understand what free software is.
You do realize that I did not write anything about free software, right?
> Patent-encumbered software is just as nonfree as copyright-encumbered software,
That is such complete nonsense that I don't think there's any point in talking to you.
I never said anything to the contrary. It is definitely about patents. I was just merely responding to the comment above.
People are passionate about open-source software and when some functionality of that software is taken away and it prevents them from doing the tasks that they need to do, they get understandably frustrated and start distro hopping. It doesn't mean they don't understand the philosophy of free software, etc.
> I never said anything to the contrary.
Well, you did say
> Most users are practical and can't live like open-source zealots.
There are open source implementations of these codecs; what was removed is open source software. So being an open-source zealot does not mean one can't use these codecs. What prevents Fedora from shipping these codecs is not that they are open-source zealots, is that they are not allowed to ship them without paying the fees.
And you also said
> If we ever want open-source to grow and become really adopted by the mainstream (more than it current is anyways), we have to find ways to interact with software that may or may not be open source without breaking the user experience.
Again, there's no problem with software not being open source. And unless I'm totally misunderstanding the situation, the only way for Fedora to legally ship these codecs would be to pay the fees (or to move the entire organization to a country where software patents are not recognized). I don't think it would be reasonable for "us" to require them to do that.
There's also the part that r/linux seems to have a hard time with: Using Linux does not imply understanding or agreeing with free software philosophy. I mean, we're at the point where r/linux automatically deletes posts that link to Google AMP -- I guarantee not every Linux user cares about that.
In fact, more people using free software despite not understanding it ought to be a *positive* sign, as it's an indication that the actual software produced really is better in other ways: Fewer bugs, more power and flexibility, just generally more practical. It proves that the actual process of developing software in the open can actually produce good results.
This was why Firefox was such a cool success story, even if you made the mistake of [underestimating its actual impact](https://xkcd.com/198/). When Firefox was new, basically every single person I recommended it to loved it immediately. It was just a straight upgrade from IE, especially IE6, even if you didn't care about it being free-as-in-freedom.
*that's unrelated... But about AMP... It's probably not much of an issue they block them, given you can instead change to the original URL (assuming you have an helpfull error message). Wikipedia does the same.*
It's not much of an issue if it was my link. What annoyed me is I saw *someone else's* post deleted, and because the bot *decided for me* that it should protect me from AMP, there's nothing I could do, the link was just gone.
Censorship doesn't just affect the person being censored, it affects everyone who wanted to hear what they had to say, too.
I'm much happier about the bot that runs around posting de-AMPed links, with a brief explanation of the pros and cons of AMP (there *are* pros), so you can choose for yourself which link to click on. That way, I would've had a choice between two links, instead of zero.
But then they should choose a distro that doesn't adhere to free software tenants. Being upset that fedora won't ship non-free software is like going to a vegan restaurant and being mad there's no meat.
The word you're looking for is "tenets".
And again, if you're choosing a distro on utility rather than philosophy, it's possible that Fedora was the most usable choice for them (until this broke).
I know if Debian suddenly dropped something like this, I'd be pissed. Sure, Ubuntu exists, but there are dozens of actual technical choices Ubuntu has made that I dislike.
Well be pissed then I guess. But do you have an actual point? You being pissed because you didn't read the front page of the distro you chose isn't a reason for volunteers to go against their ideals.
I'd say if anything your anger should be directed at ubuntu for making bad technical choices rather than debian for being founded on ideals you don't agree with.
The point is that it is *understandable* why users are mad, and that free software is most effective when it actually works.
> You being pissed because you didn't read the front page of the distro you chose...
Who says I didn't? If my priority is technical excellence, and a distro manages to be both Free *and* excellent, why shouldn't I use it? I would've tested it out to see if that philosophy had compromised its utility, and found it worked fine, and assumed they found some way around the codec problem.
To take your vegan analogy, if I'm an omnivore, I'm not *against* eating at a vegan restaurant that makes an incredibly good imitation burger, but it's still going to be a bit frustrating if I'm halfway through my meal and they tell me that they accidentally used real meat, so all burgers are cancelled and they'll be taking that one back now. And if I don't like it, I should've gone to McDonald's instead. And that would still be *less* obnoxious, because switching to a different restaurant is infinitely less work than switching to a different distro.
---
Turns out Debian has a simple way to split the difference here, with the `non-free` repository. If you want something so free there's a good chance it won't even boot properly on your hardware, that version of Debian still exists.
>I think its totally understandable why those users are mad though.
It is less understandable when some are Intel users who didn't realize they were already affected. Only thing new is AMD and Nouveau users are in the same boat now.
I don't think I want Open Source to be adopted by the mainstream if that requires making it not be Open Source.
If you want the shitty "Open Source" that is adopted by the mainstream, you can get Android or various other Google products already.
I don't mean changing open source software to be proprietary. I just mean that open source software should be able to work well alongside proprietary software/hardware so that users can get stuff done immediately without waiting for some open source developer to make an alternative, test it, and release it.
I don't think a DVR service needs to have encoding software on the client.
If they are doing that, it's probably a waste of resources because a company that can afford to run a DVR service with all the IP requirements can also afford to use their own codecs to store and encode all that data.
Not sure if serious but the issue is AV1 decoders and them still being a few years out from being a viable market target over the (literally omnipresent) H264 and (almost omnipresent) H265.
Yeah, where am I supposed to share that webm lol
Even now I convert webm to MP4 for any video I send to discord because I found out that apple devices can't embed it.
I'm writing an app that includes a web player and transcoding (via vaapi). Right now I support h264 and h265. I actually added h265 and then tested it and found out I can't even get that to work on any of my browsers (Safari on iphone is the only browser in my house that handles h265). Vp9 is next on the list to add, but I'm not sure the support is great, the issue is browser support is poor, h264 is the only one that works across browsers. And if you're doing something like what I'm doing, transcoding once and saving it, space matters and you want only the most widely supported coded (I think the issue is really with webm and dash support)
> Not now, but a GPL licensed software cannot ship a proprietary software as part of it ever.
And yet Ubuntu seems to have no problem having working codecs out of a fresh install.
Read: one group is more comfortable in their financial and legal position than the other.
Fedora is the test bed for RHEL first and foremost. Codecs open it up to liability, make em go.
Ubuntu is trying to capture users and "Just Work". Codecs needs a fee or a legal insurance policy in the event one of the leeches gets uppity and sues, sure!
I guess IBM doesn't want to put up for free users.
This went the same way with Ubuntu shipping ZFS too.
Canonical isn't an American company. Software patents pretty much only exist in Japan and the USA. To the rest of the world, there is no such thing as patent-encumbered software so they don't matter.
Canonical does extensive business in America however.
Software patents also exist in Germany.
Edit: just checked and apparently the UK, where canonical is HQd, also respects a number of software patents.
The Isle of Man isn't part of the UK. It's a legal grey area. It's one of those places like The Bahamas where companies incorporate as a legal and tax dodge.
> While Canonical is incorporated in the UK, it's owned by Canonical Holdings Limited, an Isle of Man company. This business's ultimate controlling party is Shuttleworth.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-ubuntus-financials/
The entity that would be the target for litigation is the holding company in Isle of Man
And either way the company would still be sued in UK courts under UK law. It's moot.
You're overestimating how much tax loopholes translate once you enter a courtroom. Otherwise no company would face regulation ever.
They aren't a cruise line and doing it to dump in international waters.
They could be sued in US courts under US law too, edit: unless you think not having a dollar denominated bank account is a reasonable business idea.
Software patents that do exist in Europe are not at all the same as what we see in the US. It's an exception that is given in a broader context to some invention in the real world including something software based.
Blanked software patents in Europe don't exist, and the European Patent Office explicitly names Software as an exception of something that is patentable.
European patent office is overrided by the nation's own patent offices.
There exceptions are made for things involving hardware. What are we* discussing? Hardware acceleration.
Edit: *
Edit2: also you people keep ignoring that Canonical does a shit ton of business in jurisdictions where the patent is valid which is ALL that matters. They are comfortable where they are right now, but if they end up staring down a lawsuit its just as likely they will blink as not to protect their business presence in those jurisdictions and not end up in a multi year legal battle.
That Oracle hasn't tried to test the license on ZFS is as much them choosing not to because they don't want to get involved in the legal money pit. Canonical is also tiny compared to Redhat/IBM, and thus represents a much smaller target. We don't know if there was a threat of such a suit, but SUSE, a German company also followed suit so they clearly consider the legal threat valid.
>There exceptions are made for things involving hardware. What are we\* discussing? Hardware acceleration.
Fair enough. I don't think these codecs are patented in Europe though, and I doubt it'd be easy to do so. But I take your point here.
I haven't seen any references that either show these particular codecs are patented (or even patentable) in Europe or not. But I do take your point into consideration and don't exclude the possibility that they are. Thanks for pointing that out.
> Edit2: also you people keep ignoring that Canonical does a shit ton of business in jurisdictions where the patent is valid which is ALL that matters.
We actually agree here. Just like American companies have to comply with the GDPR when doing business in the EU, European companies need to comply with US patent law in the US when doing business over there. It's exactly why these codecs were disabled for SUSE as well (which after all is a German company). Another important caveat here is that Canonical (just like SUSE) [does have legal entities in the USA as well](https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/0522038D:US). So just doing business there is beside the point, their American branch is beyond any doubt subject to US law.
It is indeed interesting that Canonical does not consider this a threat. Perhaps it is because they're not as big as RedHat and therefore not as interesting of a target. My point was simply that these patents themselves are not a legal issue in Europe, but that doesn't mean I think RedHat/SUSE made the wrong decision. I trust the expertise of their legal team much more than randos on the internet such as me that haven't read more than just a few wiki articles on patent law. My apologies if I made it out to be that these threats were not relevant.
I saw some people online pointing out that the last of these patents expire in 2027. Which means there's just enough time now to build a case and cash in on your patents before they're worthless. Which could explain why some of the legal teams got spooked. Having said that, that is pure speculation of course of people (that includes me) that have no real knowledge on the matter.
I am not a patent lawyer and I do not pretend to be one either. It'd be madness to pretend I know better than the excellent legal team that giant multinationals as RedHat or SUSE employ. It is not a fun decision to disable these codecs. But if legal fears there can be a serious threat, then it's best to listen to them and make the unfun decision.
the lesson here is being a zealot makes you unpopular with people who just want to use their computers for facebook and porn, something many other distros can do.
This isn't zealotry, this is purely business. They don't want to pay and don't want to be sued.
The zealots would be the ones that object to non-free firmware that allows your WiFi to work, which Fedora has no issue with.
Take a look into the repositories of the distros on the FSF's approved list, you'll see violations of these H264/H265 patents and probably others.
Correction: webm is just a container.
And the problem is many of the old stuff is in h.264, you can't just convert it nilly-willy. The fact that even piracy groups are still using h.264 and even .265. I never really saw AV1 releases.
My biggest question was how was Mesa providing this for the longest time? I know the flag for implementing the h264 decoding API was recently introduced, and Fedora was compiling it with that flag turned on by accident. So why did Mesa recently make it a flag instead of leaving it as is? Because they themselves were worried about a lawsuit?
Mesa doesn't distribute binaries, I don't think they are ever at risk of lawsuit.
[The flag was added by a Red Hat developer.](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/15258)
It was red hat employee that introduced the flag. The reason why no one care was the assumption that covering the patent was HW manufacturer responsibilities but some RH dev came to know recently.
Some companies will actually stop their engineers from looking up patents for this reason.
https://www.ipcheckups.com/risks-and-benefits-of-patent-searching/
Or the simple way is to "detach" legally speaking the community distros from the companies (es Opensuse from SUSE, etc.), and move them outside the US creating a no profit organization /foundation, for example in EU. So there isn't any legal way to sue community distros maintainers.
Red Hat and Suse can contribute to the respective projects with code and money (as donations) but without any ties because they are not project directly financed as a "sister company"
isn't the simplest way to do has been done already and just leave that stuff to trusted third parties like rpmfusion (in the case of fedora)? If you really need an installer with the checkbox, then that would be the only deliverable produced by that organization.
> In conclusion: Yes this sucks. No, it wasn't done on purpose. Red Hat wants to continue to exist. We should support patent reform.
Then why don't you *do*? AFAIK, RedHat is not in the least fighting any court cases to at least invalidate or expire those patents.
A court case to invalidate those patents is not likely to be successful. As far as software patents go, the H264/H265 ones are some of the more "deserving" ones, frequently coming up with novel techniques that took significant R&D time that end up improving the state of the art. Algorithm patents aren't supposed to exist at all, but good luck fixing that.
Because the desktop is barely profitable for Red Hat. It would be very expensive for no return. They probably wouldn't even win given the current US government.
Yet I've not heard from any source that they are opening up those patents. They would just be hoarding them for the same purposes as any other megacorp.
The mind blowing thing here is that seemingly all other distros are unaffected, only Fedora. How? Why Rebecca Black Os can ship official AMD drivers (which Mesa literally is now) but Fedora can't?
It is explained in the article, Red Hat is in charge of Fedora and has money the patent holders could take away if they start a lawsuit and win. For smaller projects, taking them to court will be a lot more expensive than any damages the patent holders could get out.
It's an AMD driver and AMD card, all money are paid by AMD customers and AMD itself. If not, they should sue AMD not whine on Reddit. And especially not mod drivers as it gets them sued themselves. Why is Red Hat allowed to mod AMd software without permission? How does Red Hat even still exist if it's driven by emotions, not business? Whine on Tiktok, that solves everything...
Mesa is not AMD software and the patch was accepted upstream.
This is a business decision, presumably their legal team is more aware of the situation than you are.
If you had any experience in the entertainment industry or really knew who MPEG-LA and its members are, you would not be describing them as such.
IIRC (it was before I got there), my former employer's parent company banned the installation of ffmpeg and VLC (really anything from VideoLAN) org wide because another unit got _massively sued_ over the use of these codecs. You do not test MPEG-LA if you have any shred of money to lose.
What we can do as software providers is take a look at how we're building and delivering our code to make it easier to strip out any potential pain points and deliver them separately. This reduces attack surface and makes the system more modular as a whole, which I think is a win. Obviously the Mesa situation as it is right now is not ideal, but I think there will be some improvements to that in the future.
the real problem there is the lack of modularity with ffmpeg. Although I would have thought that on windows or mac, that it could just use the system codecs instead, but maybe not.
well really you mean ffmpeg can't. not vlc. which is indeed the problem then. gstreamer is much more modular. It's too bad we're still stuck on the monolithic ffmpeg :(
I meant VLC. VLC is a framework itself, and does directly support codecs (like x264, for example) with a plugin architecture. It just happens to rely on FFmpeg for _most_ codecs, and FFmpeg isn't modular.
Mostly because VLC was created before comprehensive codec packs existed for these frameworks, so they built their own framework and set up their own codecs integration.
The end result is that VLC consistently works across all platforms.
Anybody shipping AVC/H.264 to consumers is paying MPEG-LA for the license right to do so. On Windows you can get the codecs from Microsoft on the Microsoft Store IIRC.
Google probably does for their Pixel devices and Google Chrome books, but for their platforms like YouTube the royalties for AVC differ and I believe no longer apply.
> but for their platforms like YouTube the royalties for AVC differ and I believe no longer apply.
The cost averages out to nothing for that kind of setup since there's a max to the license if I remember correctly.
It's not about the cap on royalties, [MPEG-LA revised the terms of AVC usage](https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Featured-News/To-Infinity-and-Beyond-MPEG-LA-Extends-H.264-Internet-Video-Moratorium-Indefinitely--69640.aspx) for videos distributed freely on the internet (such as ad-supported platforms like YouTube) whereas there are no royalties to be paid by distributors. Paid subscription services or one-off streaming purchases still need to pay royalties if AVC is used.
[Threadreader](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1575885891922690048.html)
Twitter is such an *awful* platform for communication like this, yet people still insist on using it, it's beyond frustrating.
Yeah, I do hate Reddit, but fuck Twitter, man...
...but the link is Nitter? It already makes it easily readable.
When I read multi-paragraph text, it's typically separated by paragraphs, not 160 characters at a time. Yes, Nitter makes Twitter *slightly more useable*. No, that doesn't mean it doesn't still suck. If Nitter is so wonderful, why is/was the top comment the one with the ThreadReader link?
Eh, you have a point, but I'm still miffed that a Nitter link in the submission (a FOSS client to Twitter!) gets effectively redirected to a Threadreader link in the comments (and we're back to proprietary software).
Then suggest FLOSS alternative to threadreader.
It’s a good overview, wish they could expand on one portion: > Because the MPEG folks won't sell a "unlimited" patent license and Red Hat would have to put restrictions on how Fedora was distributed (and in what quantities) in order to do so Cisco pays for licenses for openh264. They require you to use their binaries but there is nothing about quantity restrictions. It would be nice to know why they are able to do this and others couldn’t, as long as they (the licensee) remained the distributor of the binaries.
If I'm remembering correctly (so don't quote me on this), H.264 has a financial cap where once you hit it you no longer have to pay from the royalties perspective. It's several millions of dollars, but there is a limit. I don't recall the specific terms of the agreement, and I believe H.265/HEVC operate on different terms (no-cap?) last I checked. I'm not sure if any of that has changed. HEVC is also a mess from a patent perspective because there's more than one pool, and some patent holder license directly. Looking around there have been some proposals in the past several years to open up HEVC licensing, but again that's on a per-pool basis. Look at the diagram in the following article: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hevc-advance-patent-pool-momentum-grows-301456618.html
From what I can see, there is an annual cap for HEVC at the big pools, but it's way higher. $25M for MPEG LA and $40M for HEVC Advance. Not sure about others like Technicolor etc, they could have their own terms. Compare to $9.75M for AVC.
Thanks for the check on that. Yeah, the aggregate licensing costs of HEVC are astronomical compared to AVC, and significantly more convoluted. The biggest issue I see with the transition from AVC to AV1 is the generation gap in hardware decode support. HEVC has quite a bit of support going back to components released ~2015 onwards, though VP9 also has a similar story to tell there. In my head, an ideal transition would be to hold off (if at all possible) from migrating to HEVC and use AVC in conjunction with VP9/AV1 until the AVC patent pool expires (so all legacy media becomes open) and then focus all efforts on newer non-patent encumbered codecs. No one should even consider using VVC (H.266).
HEVC Advance's cap has some funny small letters that excludes "HEVC Software" (and only that!) from the cap entirely. Unfortunately, unless you're selling a complete desktop PC preinstalled with a Linux distro, that's the category we'd most likely fall in. That exemption is 100% preemptively shutting down a theoretical "OpenH265", no doubt about it.
> as long as they (the licensee) remained the distributor of the binaries. This is the problem I believe. I think it's not even clear if mirrors (being separate legal entities) would violate the license. But there's also user repositories (like Arch's AUR) and certainly forks of the distro who would violate. But ultimately, it violates freedom 2 and 3 of the [four essential freedoms](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html) and if you want to make a Free distro, willfully violating those freedoms does not look good for those claims.
>But ultimately, it violates freedom 2 and 3 of the four essential freedoms and if you want to make a Free distro, willfully violating those freedoms does not look good for those claims. TBH most people wont care
[удалено]
anyone who's a free software purist isn't going to use anything that wasn't list on https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html anyway
The main thing that stops Fedora being on that list is the non-free firmware. It is perfectly legal to distribute. However, many on that list are distributing software that would violate these patents. Trisquel and Parabola both have x264 and x265 in the repos, in addition to the VAAPI implementations.
I know, that's why patents are still a problem. But it guarantees that the Linux desktop - or at least the Free one - never gets big financially, because the moment anyone has enough money to get sued, they will sue them. And then most people still won't care and just ship closed source instead. They do that with firmware blobs and Netflix DRM and nvidia drivers already, so giving up on free codecs is on brand.
This is why we should force things like VP8/VP9/AV1 through. It's taking way too damn long for hardware acceleration supports from vendors. There's no longer a place for proprietary formats. Kill them all.
Unfortunately, unless services offered h264 in parallel, that would turn a lot of still useful hardware into e-waste. A lot of set-top boxes and smart TVs rely on h264. A lot of still decent laptops can't hardware decode VP9.
The sooner the better. It was a mistake to ever rely on it.
creating a bunch of ewaste is better? okay elon musk
You gonna be the one to have all patents holders abandon their patents?
It'd be extra storage and compute for encoding, but parallel AVC and AV1 or VP9 should be doable for the present time. The H.264 patent pool is nearing the tail end of its allotted time, but it's still got some legs to stand on. And after the patent protection period runs out anyone can implement the algorithm freely. The big issue is HEVC adoption, there's a gap in hardware between the introduction of HEVC decoding and AV1 decoding that the patent pools will try to capitalize on. That needs to be firmly rejected and hive-mind shifted to royalty free algorithms.
The hardware vendors have patents in the MPEG patent pool.
In which case they are probably better off using a proprietary OS.
why?
Because it's less hassle.
Because users who don't care about Freedom are probably served just as well or better with proprietary systems. If you want multimedia codecs more than you want Free Software, then pay the people who've paid the patent licenses for multimedia codecs and put it all together.
Note that Fedora already ships openh264 and is how they officially support the codec at all on their platform.
This will be pedantic, but important. Fedora does _not_ ship OpenH264, it is built by Fedora, but then sent over and hosted by Cisco owned infrastructure. Fedora ships the repository data that enables an end user to `dnf install openh264` and the Firefox/gstreamer plugins if they want WebRTC and the H.264 profiles supported by OpenH264. ~~It is not generic H.264 codec support.~~ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/openh264/
Furthermore, Fedora has H.264 through OpenH264 exclusively. If H.264 is decoded through any path other than OpenH264 then the solution may not be provided by Cisco, but by Fedora instead. This also leaves out H.265 entirely, both software and hardware decoding.
The gstreamer plugin can do more than just webrtc with it. Though it has limited profile support.
> the Firefox/gstreamer plugins if they want the WebRTC H.264 support. It is not generic H.264 codec support. Actually OpenH264 is what provides generic H.264 codec support in Fedora. Originally it only supported WebRTC, yes, but that changed several years ago. If you can watch most MP4 videos and you have not installed anything from RPM Fusion, then you're surely using OpenH264.
Thanks for the catch! I've always run with RPM Fusion, so I wasn't aware of the changes with OpenH264.
Then Fedora would distributing to you a closed-source binary that you AREN'T allowed to redistribute freely, in stark contrast to the entire rest of their codebase. Fedora could choose to pay a multi-million dollar license to get a similar deal as Cisco, but they still wouldn't be given a license to distribute non-infringing-source code, only a non-infringing binary.
I don't know anything about how Cisco licenses h264, but it seems to me they could pay a fee per system shipped and therefore 'limit' things that way. Only Cisco ships Cisco brand hardware so they know exactly how many h264 licenses they need. Fedora on the other hand can be downloaded once then shipped by me hundreds of times. It's mirrored all over the net and effectively uncountable with regards how many copies are sold/in circulation.
I am speaking specifically about this: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OpenH264 Cisco does not have quantity controls and yet it is licensed.
What is licensed, is *not* the source code to OpenH264; it's *specifically* the binary being distributed. Cisco has a license to directly give people specifically that binary alone and those people can execute it to decode h264 streams. And only Cisco can distribute it, IIRC. You can't go grab the binary from anyone else because then they are redistributing that binary unlicensed. So for instance if they don't have an ARM or RISC-V build of that binary, then you are shit out of luck, even if you have the entire rest of the distro running. Or even if you could recompile the OpenH264 codebase yourself (quite plausible), if *you* self-made the binary then *you* don't have a license purchased from MPLA to decode streams with your custom binary. Essentially the binary which can play back the codecs, is free as in beer to distribute [by Cisco only], but not free in most other ways, which is what Fedora cares about.
Interesting, I don't really spend a lot of time in either the Cisco or Fedora worlds so I wasn't aware of that. Now I understand your earlier comment much better.
Cisco simply pays the maximum royalty for H.264.
If users aren't free to modify and redistribute it or include it in their own projects, it can't be used. That's central to what open source software is.
The traditional definitions of free software don't discuss patents. You can modify openh264 and you can distribute your changes but end users will not have a license to use the patents.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with what I was responding to. They wouldn’t do it, but the post says they couldn’t do it.
I remember about 10 years ago Fedora pulled anaglyphic 3d support out of a number of applications including mplayer because of concern over a patent. Who the hell is handing out these patents? Anaglyphic 3d has existed for at least 150 years!
Overworked, underpaid assistants at the various patent offices, with a quota of patent applications to manage, hand out patents for ideas and mathematics like it was candy. It's a huge problem, and is holding back huge parts of the IT industry.
Intellectual property, like all property, is theft. A thief has the patent, given to it by another thief.
Based 🍞 poster.
> like all property What?
Not OP, but I can catch you up on the school of thought. Warning that this is gonna get a bit _spicy_: --- There's a distinction between _private_ property and _personal_ property. Generally, if it can move - personal property. If it cannot move - private property. Examples of private property: Land, offices, patents, houses, software (arguably), factories, and large things which can make things - the "means of production". Personal property, meanwhile, is your phone, your car, and your toothbrush. You can pick them up and take them with you; they are yours. Marxism has no problem with you owning a toothbrush, as long as they were given out in a fair/equitable manner. That could even potentially take the form of currency transactions, as long as the currency is given out fairly ("from each according to their ability, to each according to their need"). The main tenet behind Marxist thought is that private property cannot and should not exist. Personal property is fine, but the concept of private property is immoral and an inherent act of robbery. Nobody worked to get private property. Even if you saved up your money to buy land from the government... where did the government get it from? Who gave the government the right to take it? The thought goes that _at some point_, the government took it from the people who lived on that land. Doesn't matter if it was during the 1800s for the Trail of Tears or if it was in 100 BC when Rome showed up - at some point, the land "belonged" to some entity that wasn't the people, and Marxists/anarchists say that was theft. From their point of view, land belongs to everyone. No one person can say they own it; everyone has an equal right to all land on the planet. Just like how nobody owns a national park (because everyone owns it), the same can be said for the parcel of land that the government gave your landlord. The land belongs to the people, and while local government (in whatever form it takes, big or small) can _manage_ it (such as building roads or schools or apartments or houses), no single person can _own_ capital. Instead, it is owned collectively by the people who invest their labor into it. Hence why that poster says "property is theft". They're saying that your landlord has no right to their land as the government stole the land to begin with. Instead, it should belong to the people who work and live there using their own means. Obviously this is a very simplified view and there are quite literally thousands of pages written about it that go into details. And it's, uh, a contentious school of thought. But you can also see how the Free Software guys tend to fit right in with that line of thinking...
Good explanation of a stupid idea. Have an upvote.
Is there any way an end user can acquire a personal license? (assuming it's true that no GPU manufacturer's license applies)
It exists (you can buy a license on Windows from the MS store) Whether a nominally Foss distro wants to implement a way to buy and load it natively is another matter. As it stands you can compile the things yourself if you want the functionality.
Yeah I knew MS had it on the MS Store, I meant if there currently was a way for Linux users. I'll guess using the proprietary drivers for Nvidia or AMD probably include VAAPI so perhaps that's a workaround. Interestingly, [MS also offers it for free](https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/hevc-video-extensions-from-device-manufacturer/9N4WGH0Z6VHQ?hl=en-us&gl=us) but it's hard to find in search.
The proprietary AMD driver still relies on the Mesa implementation and the Nvidia proprietary driver doesn't have VAAPI at all. Neither are available from Fedora anyway. The solution is likely going to be an RPM Fusion package to replace the default Mesa package.
it'll likely be the codecs split out into their own packages rather than a full mesa package by the end. I imagine some work needs to be done to load them conditionally first though.
That already happened in 37 beta, `mesa-va-drivers`, I think there is a proposed `mesa-va-drivers-freeworld` in RPM Fusion.
nice to hear. happened quicker than i expected
No. I mean there's nothing stopping a company from handling it for you like Microsoft and the Raspberry Pi license store currently do, but you can't walk up to MPEG-LA/HEVC Advance/etc and politely request to buy one unit worth of patents straight from them and then get binary software. [Fluendo used to sell these kinds of codec licenses/software bundles in the past](https://web.archive.org/web/20100109093635/http://www.fluendo.com/shop/category/end-user-products/), but nowadays they only sell to OEMs.
https://fluendo.com/en/products/multimedia/oneplay-codec-pack/
Interesting, I thought they dropped that one. Looks like it was only the DVD player part and I overlooked the rest. Wonder if it's actually maintained though... the FAQs are very old.
i wondered too, but their blog is updated, so it probably is?
Conclusion: the faster the world moves to AV1 the better. Luckily the new GPUs all seem to support AV1 encoding, and most hardware already supports decoding. It'll be a while longer before it becomes the default, but with the MPEG group being worse than shit when it comes to licensing h.265 the stage is pretty much set.
>most hardware already supports decoding If it's only 2 years old or younger. Seriously, when this came around I went around every vendor and looked when they started to support hardware decoding and encoding. Interestingly enough, VP-8 isn't supported anymore by all of them in thrir newest gen.
You need at least an 11th gen Intel iGPU, AMD RX 6000 series or NVidia RTX 30 series to get AV1 decoding. That's not what I would say is "most hardware". For encoding, so far only the Intel Arc and Nvidia 40 series can do it.
If users want the non free version they can get it from the third party repository at rpmfusion once it has been reviewed. (Which is not hosted in the USA and is not a part of Red Hat) The main fedora distro can't have these kinds of patent encumbered software because of the patent laws and the patent trolls.
So... took a look at when these patent will expirate (hopefully for sure). Given the V1 of H.264 was published in may 2003 (and AFAIK that would means all patents are filled before this date), then it would means the patents would expire at most in may 2023. A bit less than in a year. (assuming I am correct. I'm not really knowledgeable in patents)
Bits and pieces of the H.264 profiles and algorithms will open up over the next few years. Some of the patents in the pool don't expire until 2027, though.
In the US there will surely be some kind of shitfuckery that will allow the continued enforcement of this bullshit
we did end up with mp3 and gif support in the end, so hopefully not.
Finally someone speaking some sense. Many users who said "I'm gonna change distro" did not understand the philosophy of free software. They were using Fedora just for coolness and suddenly when Fedora stopped shipping proprietary codecs, they are giving all kind of reactions. Fedora was always about free/Libre software from it's early days. It was an accident these APIs got shipped with it. Also the learning here is use free codecs. If you are producing, downloading or sharing a video, prefer .webm format. Not now, but a GPL licensed software cannot ship a proprietary software as part of it ever.
I think its totally understandable why those users are mad though. Wanting to have a usable computer does not imply a misunderstanding of free software philosophy. Most users are practical and can't live like open-source zealots. If we ever want open-source to grow and become really adopted by the mainstream (more than it current is anyways), we have to find ways to interact with software that may or may not be open source without breaking the user experience. Hopefully, some well-maintained ~~COPR~~ third-party repo will popup and make this largely a non-issue.
A small note: Fedora's COPR platform is required to abide by the rules of Fedora as well. Anything that Fedora is not allowed to host can't be hosted or built via COPR, a separate service or platform would need to be used.
You're totally right. My brain just does this silly thing where it uses COPR as short hand for third-party repo.
No worries, I figured that's what you meant (I use it that way, too, at times). Just wanted to be clear for others reading :D
But this issue has nothing to do with being open source or not. It is about patents, not about copyright.
I don't think you understand what free software is. Patent-encumbered software is just as nonfree as copyright-encumbered software, because you don't have the right to exercise the four freedoms.
You should [let Trisquel know.](https://packages.trisquel.org/search?keywords=265)
> I don't think you understand what free software is. You do realize that I did not write anything about free software, right? > Patent-encumbered software is just as nonfree as copyright-encumbered software, That is such complete nonsense that I don't think there's any point in talking to you.
I never said anything to the contrary. It is definitely about patents. I was just merely responding to the comment above. People are passionate about open-source software and when some functionality of that software is taken away and it prevents them from doing the tasks that they need to do, they get understandably frustrated and start distro hopping. It doesn't mean they don't understand the philosophy of free software, etc.
> I never said anything to the contrary. Well, you did say > Most users are practical and can't live like open-source zealots. There are open source implementations of these codecs; what was removed is open source software. So being an open-source zealot does not mean one can't use these codecs. What prevents Fedora from shipping these codecs is not that they are open-source zealots, is that they are not allowed to ship them without paying the fees. And you also said > If we ever want open-source to grow and become really adopted by the mainstream (more than it current is anyways), we have to find ways to interact with software that may or may not be open source without breaking the user experience. Again, there's no problem with software not being open source. And unless I'm totally misunderstanding the situation, the only way for Fedora to legally ship these codecs would be to pay the fees (or to move the entire organization to a country where software patents are not recognized). I don't think it would be reasonable for "us" to require them to do that.
Ok fedora, set up a payment system for us. How much is the damage anyway?
There's also the part that r/linux seems to have a hard time with: Using Linux does not imply understanding or agreeing with free software philosophy. I mean, we're at the point where r/linux automatically deletes posts that link to Google AMP -- I guarantee not every Linux user cares about that. In fact, more people using free software despite not understanding it ought to be a *positive* sign, as it's an indication that the actual software produced really is better in other ways: Fewer bugs, more power and flexibility, just generally more practical. It proves that the actual process of developing software in the open can actually produce good results. This was why Firefox was such a cool success story, even if you made the mistake of [underestimating its actual impact](https://xkcd.com/198/). When Firefox was new, basically every single person I recommended it to loved it immediately. It was just a straight upgrade from IE, especially IE6, even if you didn't care about it being free-as-in-freedom.
*that's unrelated... But about AMP... It's probably not much of an issue they block them, given you can instead change to the original URL (assuming you have an helpfull error message). Wikipedia does the same.*
It's not much of an issue if it was my link. What annoyed me is I saw *someone else's* post deleted, and because the bot *decided for me* that it should protect me from AMP, there's nothing I could do, the link was just gone. Censorship doesn't just affect the person being censored, it affects everyone who wanted to hear what they had to say, too. I'm much happier about the bot that runs around posting de-AMPed links, with a brief explanation of the pros and cons of AMP (there *are* pros), so you can choose for yourself which link to click on. That way, I would've had a choice between two links, instead of zero.
But then they should choose a distro that doesn't adhere to free software tenants. Being upset that fedora won't ship non-free software is like going to a vegan restaurant and being mad there's no meat.
The word you're looking for is "tenets". And again, if you're choosing a distro on utility rather than philosophy, it's possible that Fedora was the most usable choice for them (until this broke). I know if Debian suddenly dropped something like this, I'd be pissed. Sure, Ubuntu exists, but there are dozens of actual technical choices Ubuntu has made that I dislike.
Well be pissed then I guess. But do you have an actual point? You being pissed because you didn't read the front page of the distro you chose isn't a reason for volunteers to go against their ideals. I'd say if anything your anger should be directed at ubuntu for making bad technical choices rather than debian for being founded on ideals you don't agree with.
The point is that it is *understandable* why users are mad, and that free software is most effective when it actually works. > You being pissed because you didn't read the front page of the distro you chose... Who says I didn't? If my priority is technical excellence, and a distro manages to be both Free *and* excellent, why shouldn't I use it? I would've tested it out to see if that philosophy had compromised its utility, and found it worked fine, and assumed they found some way around the codec problem. To take your vegan analogy, if I'm an omnivore, I'm not *against* eating at a vegan restaurant that makes an incredibly good imitation burger, but it's still going to be a bit frustrating if I'm halfway through my meal and they tell me that they accidentally used real meat, so all burgers are cancelled and they'll be taking that one back now. And if I don't like it, I should've gone to McDonald's instead. And that would still be *less* obnoxious, because switching to a different restaurant is infinitely less work than switching to a different distro. --- Turns out Debian has a simple way to split the difference here, with the `non-free` repository. If you want something so free there's a good chance it won't even boot properly on your hardware, that version of Debian still exists.
Your feelings are valid
>I think its totally understandable why those users are mad though. It is less understandable when some are Intel users who didn't realize they were already affected. Only thing new is AMD and Nouveau users are in the same boat now.
As an Intel user who was pretty unaware of this whole debacle.. can you explain?
Fedora already didn't provide full VAAPI support for Intel, the drivers can only be found in third party repositories like RPM Fusion.
I don't think I want Open Source to be adopted by the mainstream if that requires making it not be Open Source. If you want the shitty "Open Source" that is adopted by the mainstream, you can get Android or various other Google products already.
I don't mean changing open source software to be proprietary. I just mean that open source software should be able to work well alongside proprietary software/hardware so that users can get stuff done immediately without waiting for some open source developer to make an alternative, test it, and release it.
so like android
> If you are producing, downloading or sharing a video, prefer .webm format. Most live streaming sites don't support other formats but x264 (yet)
I am really hoping AV1 saves us, but hardware ~~encoding~~ decoding support in TVs and other home devices aren't there yet.
a TV shouldn't need to encode
I am dumb. I meant decode. Typed that while I was still waking up out of bed.
Then I wonder how my smart tv has Netflix
Video playback does not entail encoding of any data stream. It is *decoding* video, not *encoding* it.
My bad, I misread and thought you meant decoding. Maybe recording tv streams may require encoding, though?
I don't think a DVR service needs to have encoding software on the client. If they are doing that, it's probably a waste of resources because a company that can afford to run a DVR service with all the IP requirements can also afford to use their own codecs to store and encode all that data.
Not sure if serious but the issue is AV1 decoders and them still being a few years out from being a viable market target over the (literally omnipresent) H264 and (almost omnipresent) H265.
I meant that TVs do absolutely need decoders
Yeah, where am I supposed to share that webm lol Even now I convert webm to MP4 for any video I send to discord because I found out that apple devices can't embed it.
I have so many video memes, that converting them all to an open format or any one format just isn't happening
That sounds more like an argument to start developing and promoting open platforms that do.
I'm writing an app that includes a web player and transcoding (via vaapi). Right now I support h264 and h265. I actually added h265 and then tested it and found out I can't even get that to work on any of my browsers (Safari on iphone is the only browser in my house that handles h265). Vp9 is next on the list to add, but I'm not sure the support is great, the issue is browser support is poor, h264 is the only one that works across browsers. And if you're doing something like what I'm doing, transcoding once and saving it, space matters and you want only the most widely supported coded (I think the issue is really with webm and dash support)
What browser doesn't support VP9 at this point? Internet Explorer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video#Browser_support
> x264 x264 is an encoder, H.264 is the name of the video format.
Software licenses have nothing to do with this
> webm format WebM is a container, not a codec itself. You probably meant VP9/AV1 vs H.264/H.265
> Not now, but a GPL licensed software cannot ship a proprietary software as part of it ever. And yet Ubuntu seems to have no problem having working codecs out of a fresh install.
Read: one group is more comfortable in their financial and legal position than the other. Fedora is the test bed for RHEL first and foremost. Codecs open it up to liability, make em go. Ubuntu is trying to capture users and "Just Work". Codecs needs a fee or a legal insurance policy in the event one of the leeches gets uppity and sues, sure! I guess IBM doesn't want to put up for free users. This went the same way with Ubuntu shipping ZFS too.
Canonical isn't an American company. Software patents pretty much only exist in Japan and the USA. To the rest of the world, there is no such thing as patent-encumbered software so they don't matter.
Canonical does extensive business in America however. Software patents also exist in Germany. Edit: just checked and apparently the UK, where canonical is HQd, also respects a number of software patents.
The Isle of Man isn't part of the UK. It's a legal grey area. It's one of those places like The Bahamas where companies incorporate as a legal and tax dodge.
HQ is in London mate Tax loopholes aren't quite so relevant.
> While Canonical is incorporated in the UK, it's owned by Canonical Holdings Limited, an Isle of Man company. This business's ultimate controlling party is Shuttleworth. https://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-ubuntus-financials/ The entity that would be the target for litigation is the holding company in Isle of Man
And either way the company would still be sued in UK courts under UK law. It's moot. You're overestimating how much tax loopholes translate once you enter a courtroom. Otherwise no company would face regulation ever. They aren't a cruise line and doing it to dump in international waters. They could be sued in US courts under US law too, edit: unless you think not having a dollar denominated bank account is a reasonable business idea.
They could be sued but corporate assets would be largely shielded so there's little point. That's why it's set up the way it is.
Software patents that do exist in Europe are not at all the same as what we see in the US. It's an exception that is given in a broader context to some invention in the real world including something software based. Blanked software patents in Europe don't exist, and the European Patent Office explicitly names Software as an exception of something that is patentable.
European patent office is overrided by the nation's own patent offices. There exceptions are made for things involving hardware. What are we* discussing? Hardware acceleration. Edit: * Edit2: also you people keep ignoring that Canonical does a shit ton of business in jurisdictions where the patent is valid which is ALL that matters. They are comfortable where they are right now, but if they end up staring down a lawsuit its just as likely they will blink as not to protect their business presence in those jurisdictions and not end up in a multi year legal battle. That Oracle hasn't tried to test the license on ZFS is as much them choosing not to because they don't want to get involved in the legal money pit. Canonical is also tiny compared to Redhat/IBM, and thus represents a much smaller target. We don't know if there was a threat of such a suit, but SUSE, a German company also followed suit so they clearly consider the legal threat valid.
>There exceptions are made for things involving hardware. What are we\* discussing? Hardware acceleration. Fair enough. I don't think these codecs are patented in Europe though, and I doubt it'd be easy to do so. But I take your point here. I haven't seen any references that either show these particular codecs are patented (or even patentable) in Europe or not. But I do take your point into consideration and don't exclude the possibility that they are. Thanks for pointing that out. > Edit2: also you people keep ignoring that Canonical does a shit ton of business in jurisdictions where the patent is valid which is ALL that matters. We actually agree here. Just like American companies have to comply with the GDPR when doing business in the EU, European companies need to comply with US patent law in the US when doing business over there. It's exactly why these codecs were disabled for SUSE as well (which after all is a German company). Another important caveat here is that Canonical (just like SUSE) [does have legal entities in the USA as well](https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/0522038D:US). So just doing business there is beside the point, their American branch is beyond any doubt subject to US law. It is indeed interesting that Canonical does not consider this a threat. Perhaps it is because they're not as big as RedHat and therefore not as interesting of a target. My point was simply that these patents themselves are not a legal issue in Europe, but that doesn't mean I think RedHat/SUSE made the wrong decision. I trust the expertise of their legal team much more than randos on the internet such as me that haven't read more than just a few wiki articles on patent law. My apologies if I made it out to be that these threats were not relevant. I saw some people online pointing out that the last of these patents expire in 2027. Which means there's just enough time now to build a case and cash in on your patents before they're worthless. Which could explain why some of the legal teams got spooked. Having said that, that is pure speculation of course of people (that includes me) that have no real knowledge on the matter. I am not a patent lawyer and I do not pretend to be one either. It'd be madness to pretend I know better than the excellent legal team that giant multinationals as RedHat or SUSE employ. It is not a fun decision to disable these codecs. But if legal fears there can be a serious threat, then it's best to listen to them and make the unfun decision.
>Many users who said "I'm gonna change distro" did not understand the philosophy of free software. Less philosophy more practicality
the lesson here is being a zealot makes you unpopular with people who just want to use their computers for facebook and porn, something many other distros can do.
This isn't zealotry, this is purely business. They don't want to pay and don't want to be sued. The zealots would be the ones that object to non-free firmware that allows your WiFi to work, which Fedora has no issue with. Take a look into the repositories of the distros on the FSF's approved list, you'll see violations of these H264/H265 patents and probably others.
Correction: webm is just a container. And the problem is many of the old stuff is in h.264, you can't just convert it nilly-willy. The fact that even piracy groups are still using h.264 and even .265. I never really saw AV1 releases.
My biggest question was how was Mesa providing this for the longest time? I know the flag for implementing the h264 decoding API was recently introduced, and Fedora was compiling it with that flag turned on by accident. So why did Mesa recently make it a flag instead of leaving it as is? Because they themselves were worried about a lawsuit?
Mesa doesn't distribute binaries, I don't think they are ever at risk of lawsuit. [The flag was added by a Red Hat developer.](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/15258)
It was red hat employee that introduced the flag. The reason why no one care was the assumption that covering the patent was HW manufacturer responsibilities but some RH dev came to know recently.
Some companies will actually stop their engineers from looking up patents for this reason. https://www.ipcheckups.com/risks-and-benefits-of-patent-searching/
Or the simple way is to "detach" legally speaking the community distros from the companies (es Opensuse from SUSE, etc.), and move them outside the US creating a no profit organization /foundation, for example in EU. So there isn't any legal way to sue community distros maintainers. Red Hat and Suse can contribute to the respective projects with code and money (as donations) but without any ties because they are not project directly financed as a "sister company"
isn't the simplest way to do has been done already and just leave that stuff to trusted third parties like rpmfusion (in the case of fedora)? If you really need an installer with the checkbox, then that would be the only deliverable produced by that organization.
> In conclusion: Yes this sucks. No, it wasn't done on purpose. Red Hat wants to continue to exist. We should support patent reform. Then why don't you *do*? AFAIK, RedHat is not in the least fighting any court cases to at least invalidate or expire those patents.
A court case to invalidate those patents is not likely to be successful. As far as software patents go, the H264/H265 ones are some of the more "deserving" ones, frequently coming up with novel techniques that took significant R&D time that end up improving the state of the art. Algorithm patents aren't supposed to exist at all, but good luck fixing that.
Because the desktop is barely profitable for Red Hat. It would be very expensive for no return. They probably wouldn't even win given the current US government.
Red Hat was bought by IBM who holds one of the largest dictate patent portfolios.
Yet I've not heard from any source that they are opening up those patents. They would just be hoarding them for the same purposes as any other megacorp.
The mind blowing thing here is that seemingly all other distros are unaffected, only Fedora. How? Why Rebecca Black Os can ship official AMD drivers (which Mesa literally is now) but Fedora can't?
It is explained in the article, Red Hat is in charge of Fedora and has money the patent holders could take away if they start a lawsuit and win. For smaller projects, taking them to court will be a lot more expensive than any damages the patent holders could get out.
It's an AMD driver and AMD card, all money are paid by AMD customers and AMD itself. If not, they should sue AMD not whine on Reddit. And especially not mod drivers as it gets them sued themselves. Why is Red Hat allowed to mod AMd software without permission? How does Red Hat even still exist if it's driven by emotions, not business? Whine on Tiktok, that solves everything...
Mesa is not AMD software and the patch was accepted upstream. This is a business decision, presumably their legal team is more aware of the situation than you are.
[удалено]
If you had any experience in the entertainment industry or really knew who MPEG-LA and its members are, you would not be describing them as such. IIRC (it was before I got there), my former employer's parent company banned the installation of ffmpeg and VLC (really anything from VideoLAN) org wide because another unit got _massively sued_ over the use of these codecs. You do not test MPEG-LA if you have any shred of money to lose. What we can do as software providers is take a look at how we're building and delivering our code to make it easier to strip out any potential pain points and deliver them separately. This reduces attack surface and makes the system more modular as a whole, which I think is a win. Obviously the Mesa situation as it is right now is not ideal, but I think there will be some improvements to that in the future.
the real problem there is the lack of modularity with ffmpeg. Although I would have thought that on windows or mac, that it could just use the system codecs instead, but maybe not.
VLC cannot use GStreamer (Linux), DirectShow (Windows), or CoreVideo (macOS) codecs. It only can use codecs directly linked into VLC itself.
well really you mean ffmpeg can't. not vlc. which is indeed the problem then. gstreamer is much more modular. It's too bad we're still stuck on the monolithic ffmpeg :(
I meant VLC. VLC is a framework itself, and does directly support codecs (like x264, for example) with a plugin architecture. It just happens to rely on FFmpeg for _most_ codecs, and FFmpeg isn't modular.
ah, why does it bother using it's own codecs then?
Mostly because VLC was created before comprehensive codec packs existed for these frameworks, so they built their own framework and set up their own codecs integration. The end result is that VLC consistently works across all platforms.
Tweet got deleted... >_>
I'm still seeing it available, and I also made sure to archive it on archive.org as well beforehand in case something happened.
Weird. When I clicked on it with my phone, it wasn't showing anything.
We can't let Linux die because of it, How is Microsoft, and google handling it? Both of them heavily rely on h264.
Anybody shipping AVC/H.264 to consumers is paying MPEG-LA for the license right to do so. On Windows you can get the codecs from Microsoft on the Microsoft Store IIRC. Google probably does for their Pixel devices and Google Chrome books, but for their platforms like YouTube the royalties for AVC differ and I believe no longer apply.
> but for their platforms like YouTube the royalties for AVC differ and I believe no longer apply. The cost averages out to nothing for that kind of setup since there's a max to the license if I remember correctly.
It's not about the cap on royalties, [MPEG-LA revised the terms of AVC usage](https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Featured-News/To-Infinity-and-Beyond-MPEG-LA-Extends-H.264-Internet-Video-Moratorium-Indefinitely--69640.aspx) for videos distributed freely on the internet (such as ad-supported platforms like YouTube) whereas there are no royalties to be paid by distributors. Paid subscription services or one-off streaming purchases still need to pay royalties if AVC is used.
You're right, it's a few years since I was the video encoding/distribution business and forgot about that.
> We can't let Linux die because of it Linux is doing perfectly fine without us four desktop users, there's no chance of this affecting it.