Will H.264 Codec Support Come To Fedora? Nope.

[yogi_berra]

It sucks that Fedora by itself is not a usable distro, but then Fedora developers cannot be blamed for that, the US patent system is the culprit.

On the contrary. There is nothing stopping Fedora or Red Hat from buying a license for H.264 to distribute with x264 something they could easily afford to do. They choose not to.

[DaemonFC]

On the contrary. There is nothing stopping Fedora or Red Hat from buying a license for H.264 to distribute with x264 something they could easily afford to do. They choose not to.

Spending $64.47 per user on patent licenses for something they give away freely isn't going to happen.

You're more than welcome to buy them for yourself.

http://www.fluendo.com/

Or you can just use RPM Fusion like everyone else does and shut up.

[yogi_berra]

Spending $64.47 per user on patent licenses for something they give away freely isn't going to happen.

The point is he was blaming Patent law when the blame lies with Fedora's policies. But do continue to flame, it makes the community seem so inviting to new users.

[DaemonFC]

The point is he was blaming Patent law when the blame lies with Fedora's policies. But do continue to flame, it makes the community seem so inviting to new users.

If you want to buy every Fedora user a patent license that costs almost as much as a copy of Windows, I'm sure most of them won't turn you down, I just hope you have the few million dollars handy.

[Hamish Wilson]

The point is he was blaming Patent law when the blame lies with Fedora's policies. But do continue to flame, it makes the community seem so inviting to new users.

Sorry, what?

It is not just about money. Fedora strives to be a free distro. You can not be truly free if you need to pay a patent to legally redistribute your source code.

By painting it as some crass financial excuse, you demean the moral issue behind all of this.

If you want to use the codecs legally you can just pay for them yourself. It is not as if Red Hat has been asking for you to pay for anything.

[JanC]

As a Fedora user, I fully support keeping the base distribution patent free.

Every non-trivial package in the Fedora repositories is covered by tens or sometimes even hundreds of patents. Are you willing to remove all those packages (including the linux kernel) from Fedora?

(Of course not all owners of these patents are hostile and/or request payments, or at least they don't right now.)

[DaemonFC]

Every non-trivial package in the Fedora repositories is covered by tens or sometimes even hundreds of patents.)

Citation needed.

[AdamW]

On the contrary. There is nothing stopping Fedora or Red Hat from buying a license for H.264 to distribute with x264 something they could easily afford to do. They choose not to.

I already explained why that isn't true, in excruciating detail, earlier in this thread.

You cannot buy an H.264 patent license which is compatible with x264's copyright license (i.e. inheritable). MPEG-LA will not sell you one.

[DaemonFC]

I already explained why that isn't true, in excruciating detail, earlier in this thread.

You cannot buy an H.264 patent license which is compatible with x264's copyright license (i.e. inheritable). MPEG-LA will not sell you one.

Which means that the only option that could be legally licensed in this situation would be the Fluendo codecs. Which not only cost a fortune and surrender to the MPEG-LA patent troll, but introduce a proprietary software problem too.

[AdamW]

Which means that the only option that could be legally licensed in this situation would be the Fluendo codecs. Which not only cost a fortune and surrender to the MPEG-LA patent troll, but introduce a proprietary software problem too.

Well, yeah, including them in Fedora is clearly a non-starter.