The world beyond OpenH264

Posted Mar 26, 2025 21:11 UTC (Wed) by mat2 (guest, #100235)
In reply to: The world beyond OpenH264 by intelfx
Parent article: Bhattcharya: Closing the chapter on OpenH264

> Why not have this hypothetical entity sell patent licenses for FFmpeg?

Because FFmpeg is licensed under GPL / LGPL, which effectively prohibits such licensing (or at least makes it problematic).

The world beyond OpenH264

Posted Mar 26, 2025 23:20 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

GPLv2 doesn't prohibit a third-party from selling licenses. Microsoft had been doing that with Linux-related patents for a while.

Essentially, you can sell a piece of paper telling that the patent holders won't sue you if you are using ffmpeg.

The world beyond OpenH264

Posted Mar 27, 2025 4:38 UTC (Thu) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (2 responses)

> Because FFmpeg is licensed under GPL / LGPL, which effectively prohibits such licensing (or at least makes it problematic).

As the sibling comment says, I'm not aware of anything in either GPL or LGPL that would prohibit selling *patent* licenses (for a given $binary, or any binary built from unmodified $source, or any other variation on that theme). Patents and copyrights are orthogonal.

The world beyond OpenH264

Posted Mar 27, 2025 8:13 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> that would prohibit selling *patent* licenses

It is there, though ... *for*patents*and*licences*you*own*. You are explicitly required to pass on any necessary licences you own, under the terms of the GPL, and that obviously includes patent licences.

But if you don't have such licences, you are neither able nor obligated to pass them on.

Not sure how this would impact your ability to share codec-playing software if you bought one of these licences, though.

Cheers,
Wol

Patent pool trickery

Posted Mar 27, 2025 9:47 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Note that this sort of thing is one of the reasons behind patent pools for codecs; that creates a non-practising entity which has the right to sublicense all of the patents it licenses, but does not itself sell another other than patent licences.

Their primary reason to exist is to work around all the ways in which people might end up with a patent licence without paying for it - and one of the things they are quite legally able to do is to say that you have to prove that (say) Microsoft has a valid patent licence that it sublicensed to you under the GPL terms when it distributed a GPL'd codec. After all, if Microsoft doesn't have a licence itself, it can't pass it on to you - and Microsoft is not obliged to detail what patent licences it does, or does not, hold, merely to confirm that it's passed on all licences that it holds.

This means that relying on the terms of the GPL ends up with you being on the sharp end of an expensive lawsuit, since you need to pursue your upstream for discovery to show that they have licences they can pass onto you - and that not only gets pricy, but also runs the risk of exposing your upstream to further legal action (if they did not, in fact, have licences they could pass onto you).