Chiariglione: A crisis, the causes and a solution [LWN.net]

Chiariglione: A crisis, the causes and a solution

Posted Jan 30, 2018 17:35 UTC (Tue) by mfuzzey (subscriber, #57966)
Parent article: Chiariglione: A crisis, the causes and a solution

By his reasoning the Linux kernel should have stopped improving years ago since no one pays royalties for it.
Yet it's going strong and more and more people are being paid to work on it...

I think that as long as there are commercially viable *uses* for better video codecs investment will continue and people will be paid to improve them.

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Chiariglione: A crisis, the causes and a solution

Posted Jan 30, 2018 18:11 UTC (Tue) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

His assumption that the only economic benefit is tolling the IP with patents is deeply flawed as you note, it flies in the face of the entire open source community and even significant numbers of businesses outside opensource. Codecs will continue to be developed, it's just going to be done by companies that aren't interested in patenting because they want the widest possible deployment, like another poster said that covers companies like Google, and Facebook who have strong financial incentives to develop newer and better compression technology.