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Comment by errantmind | Hacker News Reader

Software patents, and patents in general, are a plague on the industry and should be abolished due to a lack of empirical evidence to justify their existence. As a thought experiment they make sense, but thought experiments often diverge from reality.

The Case Against Patents:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/more/2012-035

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Patents don’t solve for innovation. What they solve for is time for marketing and market adoption of a novelty, which is what people (investors) mistakenly refer to as innovation.

No, they refer to it is as IP protection.

> Software patents, and patents in general, are a plague on the industry [...]

The article is specifically about hardware and excludes software:

The planned Opus program will focus on hardware devices and will not be directed towards open-source software, applications, services, or content

The pool, however, explicitly includes software <https://www.opuspool.com/>:

> The Opus pool license covers the specifications […], and the official software releases of the Opus audio codec, […]

That sounds like a meaningless distinction if the patent covers software running in general purpose hardware.

The article talks about suing hardware manufacturers, it doesn't say the patent pool excludes software (it doesn't).

Here is a debate on IP with two different libertarian perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep2-ohgFOys `Abolish the IP laws` side provides some pointers to related research and empirical evidence against IP.

Seems like they are going after hardware implementations, not software (not that that's much better).

So they claim. But they’re also explicitly including software in the scope of the pool itself.

That's can be a super hard line to draw as many hardware implementations are just firmware running on hardware with some specialized dsp instructions.

I wonder if this could stifle (hardware) use of the RFC Opus over A2DP vendor codec that was slowly coming together on Pipewire.

(Which is kind of in the chicken-egg position where there's no hardware to receive it outside of other pipewire clients anyway.)

Edit: It's already merged and ready for use, and is the only thing that'll do multi-channel audio over bluetooth?

I'm hoping to add support for Opus to the upcoming PineBuds Pro, but no guarantees I'll be able to accomplish it at my current skill level. So far I couldn't even get the first SDK to compile (https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineBuds_Pro).

I would have thought that something like that would have been all offloaded to hardware or in a weird DSP assembly (Like how Qualcomm have their newer aptx codecs as Hexagon DSP code), but I see a LDAC decoder as a regular ARM object in there.

Good luck to you I guess.

Sounds like they didn't have the balls to sue Microsoft. (Opus is SILK+CELT and SILK was developed by Skype, which was bought by MS)

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