Apple to open-source video calling protocol FaceTime

businessinsider.com

6 pointstomwans5 comments

Who's claiming that it's "open-source". They're only claiming that it's an open standard. That just means that they'll tell you how it works. Not provide code or anything else. Nor does it imply that it's royalty free.

Well... Without FLOSS-friendly AV codecs in the standard, it's no use to open-source it.

Nah, people will just keep using ffmpeg and pretending that patents don't exist.

why? the encoders / decoders can still be OSS, and you can use h264 for free for personal use. Even if you won't be allowed to do this in the future, the rest of the toolchain can always be used with another standard.

> and you can use h264 for free for personal use

I was not aware it could be distributed for free. That's why many Linux distros don't include it on the base install, but allow it for download in countries with sane patent systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com