Codecs and Software Patents - Part XII - GNU's Web Site Will Soon Have Many Recent Talks by Chief GNUisance Richard Stallman (RMS)
In the previous part we wrote about GNU videos being transcoded or converted into AV1, having explained some legal basis. Now that some more recent RMS talks are being uploaded to third-party sites [1, 2] we wish to discuss this some more. Are patents on software a threat here? Is that a "lesser threat" than proprietary JavaScript?
"My own view is that [Florian] Muller resurfacing on this topic is probably worth watching," one insider told us, "but not cause for alarm yet — it's really just more material to write about. And now you've got someone new on the GNU A/V team who can pull mailing list screenshots or dig through the RMS archives whenever it's useful ;-)" (as a matter of goodwill and good faith, not muck-raking).
"From the GNU/FSF side, there's a compelling case for supporting AV1 as both a practical and freedom respecting format. It isn't an entirely new relationship either — AOMedia already stewards the VP8/VP9 codecs, and the WebM/WebP containers, so this is more of a natural progression than a leap of faith. And the technical argument speaks for itself: AV1 delivers roughly 30-50% better compression than VP9 at equivalent bitrates, which means smaller files, lower bandwidth requirements, and better accessibility for anyone publishing or archiving video - exactly the kind of improvement that matters for a project like GNU's A/V archive."
The GNU's A/V archive has been redirected to this short address instead of this subsite (https://audio-video.gnu.org/video/).
"AV1 for a while did feel like a bit of a trap," we got told, "but as Dr. Stallman has seen along with me, recently AOmedia is standing firm on all ten - and AV1 has a better track record of getting patents overturned in the EPO, Japan, and China than VP9 did. Also most of those lawsuits mention VP8/9 in conjunction with AOmedia, so it's really just tech companies throwing money at lawyers for no reason other than to attack and shut down a free/open standard [in my humble opinion]."
"We’re almost done wrapping up the AV1 conversions over at the GNU project too! I’m finishing the last round with Ms. Dora while she focuses on documenting changes and updating metadata for publication." █
Previously:
Image source: Richard Stallman at LibrePlanet 2019 by Ruben Rodriguez
