The H.264 problem looks just like the first stages of the LZW patent fiasco all over again. People think it's OK and it gets widely adopted. But at some point lawyers will start sending letters. Given history on the subject, the questions are "when" and "who", not "if."
It's dangerous for the web's videos to rely on a format for which royalties are expected to be paid. Hopefully Google will release the VP8 codec as a royalty-free alternative (as rumour has it) and it becomes the standard.
tl;dr Canonical have a H.264 license agreement, but that doesn't mean Ubuntu users are covered by it. You're only covered if you buy some hardware that comes with Ubuntu AND the hardware manufacturer explicitly tells you that they have licensed H.264 (and possibly other codecs) from Canonical.
This all goes away when software patents do, right?
Something I haven't heard much about lately is x264. Is a H.264 license required to use x264 in some situations?
Isn't that how patents work? You have to pay up no matter who implements it, as long as it is a patent? (copyright, on the other hand, depends on whether your implementation is a derivative work of or copies etc. their implemenation).
Isn't that how patents work? You have to pay up no matter who implements it, as long as it is patented? (copyright, on the other hand, depends on whether your implementation is a derivative work of or copies etc. their implemenation).
It would be interesting if Caonincal would release a version of Ubuntu with the proprietary software installed for a low price. I wonder how many people would pay for it?