Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 11th Mar 2008 23:28 UTC, submitted by irbis
"Does GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza's backflip over the Novell-Microsoft deal a few days ago mean that he has finally been convinced that he is on a one-way path to nowhere? Has he realised that his own project, Mono, is actually putting GNOME on a development track that can leave it open to patent claims one day? And has he realised that creating Moonlight, a clone of Microsoft's Silverlight, (with which the company hopes to trump Adobe's Flash) is not going to advance the cause of free software one iota?"
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Member since:
2005-07-27
Silverlight is mainly used for video right now (if at all), so if you want to use it then you will need to compile Moonlight with ffmpeg yourself. Amusingly, this has patent issues according to Miguel in his post so Novell won't do this, so they are going to do some licensing of patents to allow this to happen at an unspecified date. This means that if you're using an implementation or distribution that isn't Novell's, you're out of luck.
The issue is very simple, unless we are able to transfer the same patent rights that we have to third parties when we redistribute ffmpeg code, we are not allowed to distribute ffmpeg.
As we are going to become licensor (for other reasons beyond Moonlight) to MPEGLA's VC-1 we can not distribute ffmpeg ourselves.
This should not prevent anyone from distributing it themselves, and those that do not have valid VC-1 patents in their countries to do so.
Miguel.