Vysor is no longer available – H.264 licensing
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As much as I hate patent trolls, this isn't really patent trolling.
To make matters worse, I informed Koushik Dutta about this possible issue back in 2015[3] and he closed my GitHub issue and ignored it. I'm not surprised at the outcome.
[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/native-client/pepper_dev/c/stru...
What difference does it make? It even seems backwards in some sense --- that writing code based on a freely available spec means you have to pay a license fee, yet someone else can give away their implementation freely? IANAL, so perhaps what we think of as the crazy and contorted bureaucratic mess that is the patent system would make sense in some strange and twisted way to those who designed it.
That's so fucking stupid.
Why should anyone be able to nullify the entire value of another company just by implementing the spec they published?
Therefore, the patent system.
I'm sure somebody will try to claim "chilling effect" based on one of those "free" not being Free. But things are better than they've ever been from the point of view that matters most: getting stuff done, getting stuff published, and getting yourself heard without forcing your audience to install stuff first.
Some tiny royalty payment pre-paid by the platform doesn't destroy the experience. But forcing my mom to install some sketchy open source software with the wrong volume control UI then telling her to drag and drop my Happy Mother's Day video onto a traffic cone sure does.
If you take their code and compile it yourself, you are on the hook for fees of users, just as if you wrote the code yourself.
I don't like it, but it is a logical option that if someone pays it is the one responsible for making the "product" (=binary including the codec)
I'm sorry, how is using the source which needs compilation different from using the binary provided?
He closed it five days ago, which seems especially interesting.
fwiw, speaking as the maintainer of a reasonably popular OSS project, it may be worthwhile to include actionable next steps in your issue. Including the comment you just wrote here might have made it easier for him to take action on this back in 2015.
Btw, Chrome's built in APIs (Pepper VideoDecoder) were not available until around 10 months after my first implementation of Vysor.
Your issue was opened in November. I closed it on May 11th, and received the letter on May 13th. Timing here is definitely suspect.
Intent is for it to be royalty free, open and supported in major browsers and devices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFmpeg#Legal_aspects
I believe the way to fight software patents is civil disobedience.
The Wikipedia article is a bit misleading because although it cites the EU as an example, most software patents are allowed in the EU, including many H.264 patents. I would encourage you to fight software patents not by infringing, but by using royalty-free alternatives.
Using patents like this is pretty much the patent equivalent of entrapment.
Also, why isn't Vysor just using the HMTL5 facilities to use hardware h264 enc/decs?
Or the built-in Chrome API for that, PPB_VideoEncoder: https://developer.chrome.com/native-client/pepper_dev/c/stru...
Well actually, it might be okay on desktop.
But yes, I've switched.
https://standards.ieee.org/develop/policies/bylaws/approved-...
Not sure why improving this state of affairs would require a change in underlying patent laws. We just need standards bodies to adopt more general patent policies--which could be accomplished by preferring to use standards from orgs with better patent policies.
The problem with this is that there will always be someone who will happily say "Sure, I'll call your patent a 'standard' if you give me a little bit of money to 'certify' it."
Secondly, standards setting bodies are usually a conglomerate of members from competing companies and hence a huge political bureaucratic mess, so it's not as easy to get something into the standard just for some money.
(I'm not familiar with Vysor but whatever you do, stay away from libvlc if you're looking for a decoder/encoder. That stuff is not kosher in most countries. ffmpeg is a gray area too.)
Some highlights from a few years ago (may differ slightly now but unlikely):
* No licensing fee
* Free for private/personal, non-commercial usage (e.g. non-monetized YouTube, cat videos)
* < 100,000 units = no royalties! (Unit defined as encoder or decoder)
* > 100,000 units = 0.20c/unit
The process is simple, you ping them, they FedEx you a stack of easy to read papers, sign it, and mail it back.
[IANAL so obvious use-common-sense boilerplate goes here.]
... yes, that's exactly what they are doing?
The alternative is to be mindless coder drones that produce "content" for people who don't value it but profit from it. Like musicians producing music for music companies but somehow not getting paid for it, you too can be a doofus with a Google+ account adding value to the Android or Apple ecosystem with your free app. Get "wrote an app" on your resume, make a snappy logo, then flounce out with a sad Google+ post to extract maximum brogrammer value!
I increasingly see these issues as self-serving ways for some dude to get out of the hassles of maintaining some bullshit free app with 8 users.
Somewhere there's a real company who'll cut the $50k check. Somewhere there's a hungrier, smarter developer who'll work around the issue. Somewhere there's a dirtier, angrier developer who'll fight for what's right against inane licensing terms. This developer is none of the above, nor is he contributing to furthering the industry. Begone.