I’d be willing to pay but I can’t [LWN.net]

I’d be willing to pay but I can’t

Posted Jun 2, 2025 18:06 UTC (Mon) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188)
In reply to: Made up problem by smoogen
Parent article: OpenH264 induces headaches for Fedora

I’d be more than happy to pay the (presumably small) per-user royalty needed, but none of the common first-party or third-party repositories I know of have a way to do it!

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I’d be willing to pay but I can’t

Posted Jun 2, 2025 21:54 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

The problem is, as soon as you pay the royalty, unless you pay it for EVERYONE you personally cannot distribute any GPL software that you have so licenced. If you have a patent licence, you have to grant all your downstream a patent licence. And in order to do that, you presumably have to buy the patent, not just a licence.

Which is why the distros don't even attempt to play that game. They'd rather play the MAD game - "sue us and we'll use prior art to turn your portfolio into scorched earth".

I think there were a couple of small instances of that on GrokLaw, and the plaintiffs didn't know what hit them.

Cheers,
Wol

I’d be willing to pay but I can’t

Posted Jun 9, 2025 23:15 UTC (Mon) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188) [Link] (1 responses)

Which distros were defendants in those cases?

I’d be willing to pay but I can’t

Posted Jun 10, 2025 6:37 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Don't think it was distros - I just have vague memories of patent threats or something, and the resulting threads were chock-full of prior art.

I think at least one threat actor found themselves fending off loads of claims for re-examination.

Cheers,
Wol

I’d be willing to pay but I can’t

Posted Jun 3, 2025 9:22 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

I enquired about it a while ago; you have two choices from the patent pools:

Buy a licence that covers a specific binary only. Something like the Fluendo GStreamer codec pack, for example. This gets you binaries that are "legal", but where you can't compile your own.
Pay $huge to cover all open source users. This is a non-starter for even the biggest of companies - the H.264 patent pool was talking about a figure in the billions of dollars per year, for example.

And note that the per-user royalties are not necessarily small; the patent pools want to go back to the "glory days" where they got to charge a small amount per decoder (about $1), plus a per-minute fee for use of encoders that varied depending on the audience, plus a fee per encoder.