This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 15, 2017 17:54 UTC (Wed) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733)
Parent article: This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

If you use Fedora or not, we all owe this guy a pint or ten.

to post comments

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 15, 2017 18:09 UTC (Wed) by alonz (subscriber, #815) [Link] (17 responses)

Why are you trying to ruin his liver?

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 15, 2017 20:35 UTC (Wed) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link]

So that I can have his job, obviously...

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 15, 2017 20:55 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

It's not a question of whether Spot is going to drink, it's a question of who's going to pay for the drinks.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 15, 2017 20:59 UTC (Wed) by spot (guest, #15640) [Link] (14 responses)

I believe you are several years too late for that concern. :D

I happily accept "thank you" drinks.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 15, 2017 23:19 UTC (Wed) by mspevack (subscriber, #36977) [Link]

Just popping up to give a very heartfelt and sincere "thank you for everything you do for Fedora" to an old friend.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 16, 2017 0:14 UTC (Thu) by eternaleye (guest, #67051) [Link] (7 responses)

Any odds you might see fit to publish that calendar as an iCal feed or similar?

Let's be real, I doubt I'm the only one who'd find that FAR more useful (and interesting) than "US Holidays" or whatever other people's calendar software tends to throw in! (This despite that I do, in fact, live in the US.)

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 16, 2017 0:16 UTC (Thu) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link] (6 responses)

In the talk video, it is mentioned that RH's lawyers asked that said calendar not be made public. There is no reason the community can't create such a calendar though.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 16, 2017 9:59 UTC (Thu) by vxIjhjYG (guest, #110420) [Link] (5 responses)

I am curious to know the reasoning behind that. To avoid interested parties trying to prolong their patents somehow, maybe?

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 16, 2017 11:13 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

I'd guess that it's more prosaic; the calendar is effectively a nice way to present legal advice that could be trivially rewritten as "Red Hat's legal team believe that there are no patents affecting $thing after $date". Given that it's legal advice, you run into the usual "this isn't legal advice and I'm not your lawyer" issues - from Red Hat's point of view, it's simpler to not publish the calendar at all (in any form) than to publish it, have to keep it updated, deal with problems caused when they update it on the basis of new information but you don't get the update etc.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 16, 2017 19:43 UTC (Thu) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (3 responses)

My guess is, publishing the calendar makes it public which patents Redhat does know about. That makes it easier to claim and/or prove willful infringement which can triple the damages.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 16, 2017 19:47 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (2 responses)

That makes no sense. If a patent is on the calendar, that means they knew about it and avoided using it . Pretty much the opposite of willful infringement.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 16, 2017 20:32 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

>That makes no sense. If a patent is on the calendar, that means they knew about it and avoided using it . Pretty much the opposite of willful infringement.

"Willful infringement" is a legal definition, which may or may not bear any semblance to common sense.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 25, 2017 18:57 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I would add also, as a scientist, that "common sense" usually == "wrong".

Cheers,
Wol

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 16, 2017 3:56 UTC (Thu) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link]

Thank you spot!

*Drinks*

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 21, 2017 16:07 UTC (Tue) by KAMiKAZOW (guest, #107958) [Link] (3 responses)

I didn't see a fresh Fedora installation since a while (I just upgrade mine) but I hope your calender did not forget the MPEG-1 video patents. Considering that MP3 is the newest of MPEG-1 standards, video playback and probably even encoding should also work OOTB.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 21, 2017 16:19 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

It is included in the repo. Not installed by default in Fedora 25. That is the plan for Fedora 26

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Mar 14, 2017 16:21 UTC (Tue) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link] (1 responses)

Is MPEG-1 video still used for anything nowadays?

My guess is it's obsolete, unless you have some antique Video CDs you recorded somewhere in the Middle Ages… ☺

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Mar 21, 2017 22:26 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

It was a year or so ago, but I saw an article proposing MPEG-1 as the minimum standard WebRTC codec because it was newly patent-free at the time and Apple was (is) throwing a tantrum over VP8/9.