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Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

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Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#141

Post by ken47 »

throwawaykf05 wrote: post #113
jngreenlee wrote: post #2

"We also hired patent lawyers and consultants familiar with this technology area. We created a new codec development process which would allow us to work through the long list of patents in this space, and continually evolve our codec to work around or avoid those patents. Our efforts are far from complete, but we felt it was time to open this up to the world." This burden is becoming far too great, when this is the…

As has been said elsewhere, this is not the cost need to achieve innovation, this is the cost needed to avoid paying others who have already invented something before. And as often it is with patents, the outcome is more invention. All those workarounds are also innovation.

Many readers would take issue of your use of the word "invented" in this context. Was the Pythagorean theorem also "invented" in your opinion?

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#142

Post by FooBarWidget »

anon1385 wrote: post #53
JoshTriplett wrote: post #44

> Google’s proprietary VP9 codec That's an odd choice of phrase; it's unfortunate that a press release chooses to disparage alternatives without explanation.

Why is that odd? It is pretty much a textbook example of a proprietary standard. Here are some definitions of "proprietary" as used by members of the FOSS community when talking about standards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4634957 (BrendanEich) >"Proprietary" as in "sole proprietor" is appropriate for a project with zero governance, launched by Google after some incubation closed-source, dominated by Googler…

That is a really odd thing to claim, given that there are so many proponents of the MIT license. People claim that MIT is "more free than GPL" because MIT has less restrictions. GPL has more restrictions, and although those restrictions are there to ensure that the same rights are passed on other people, MIT proponents don't buy that argument: they argue that even if someone forks an open source project, slap a GUI on it and sell it as a proprietary product, no freedom is lost because the original is still available. It does not matter that you cannot contribute to the fork. The ability to make proprietary forks is seen as good.

Yet when applied to Google's products, this is suddenly viewed in a different manner? Even if the maintainer does not accept patches, you can still fork it, so no freedom is lost. And it's ok for other people to make a proprietary fork, but not ok for the author to make a proprietary fork? That sounds like hypocrisy to me.

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#143

Post by slacka »

oconnor663 wrote: post #127
thefreeman wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert, but the article lists VP9 as "proprietary". Which I take to mean not open source, and potentially not free. Though the proprietariness could be a response to the issues they had with VP8 and suspected reactionary patenting.

VP9 is open source and royalty-free though. I'm confused.

And it's not just open source, it's BSD which is about as none restrictive as you can get. So now 1) Open Source 2) Royalty-free 3) Free as in beer 4) Free as in freedom (Open Source OSI certified BSD)

Software can now be call proprietary?

pro·pri·e·tar·y : of or relating to an owner or ownership.

So what is this guys saying. That now anything with a company behind is is proprietary? Linux has got LMI, so I guess that's proprietary, and firefox has got Mozilla. Libreoffice...by this guys twisted version of reality, what is not proprietary?

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#144

Post by m_eiman »

ken47 wrote: post #138
Asbostos wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even forbidding killing isn't a natural law. In many societies it has been legal to kill slaves, animals, foreigners, gays, people who break the artificial laws, etc. So killing is often seen as good for society. No laws of property ownership, right to life, right to freedom, etc are natural. They're just things that some societies, sometimes have decided are worth restricting.

To quote the parent to your comment: "Natural laws are laws that any rational nation would arrive at..."

"Rational" isn't objective; it's apparently rational for parts of the US to kill its citizens for committing certain crimes, while most developed nations do not.

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#145

Post by usrusr »

Asbostos wrote: post #136
forrestthewoods wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright has succeeded a thousand times more than its failed. It's pretty great for the most part. It enables a vast, vast number of jobs and new creations. It could certainly be better. But I'd much rather have what copyright as it exists today than for it to not exist at all. And don't forget that GPL is only enforceable due to copyright law.

Good point about GPL. Some people advocate for much shorter copyright terms, just enough to make it worthwhile creating the work, like say 20 years. But that would push some GPL software into the public domain, thus damaging the GPL ecosystem by allowing commercial competitors to use the same code.

Pardon me if I have trouble seeing a terrible loss for the GNU ecosystem if releases from 1995 were transferred to the public domain.

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#146

Post by 0x09 »

shmerl wrote: post #134
derf_ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, I'm the Daala tech lead. One of the things that made Opus a success was the contributions of others. We certainly don't have a monopoly on good ideas. We'll take pieces of Daala and stick them in Thor and pieces of Thor and stick them in Daala, and figure out what works best. Some of that experimentation has already begun: https://github.com/cisco/thor/pull/8 https://review.xiph.org/874/ https://www.ietf.org/p…

Is Thor based on similar principles to Daala (i.e. like lapped transforms) to make it useful for merging? And unrelated question, what will be the name of the merged codec? I hope it won't remain as NetVC, as that name is awful.

According to the spec, Thor is a more traditional block-based codec with quadtree subdivisions in the vein of H.264 and forward.

Beyond that the design is rather conservative and different from Daala's "start over from scratch" methodology. It doesn't look like the two would be poised to merge directly a-la Opus at this point, but rather to be mutual test beds and borrow and exchange unencumbered ideas that work well.

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#147

Post by 0x09 »

slacka wrote: post #143
oconnor663 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VP9 is open source and royalty-free though. I'm confused.

And it's not just open source, it's BSD which is about as none restrictive as you can get. So now 1) Open Source 2) Royalty-free 3) Free as in beer 4) Free as in freedom (Open Source OSI certified BSD) Software can now be call proprietary? pro·pri·e·tar·y : of or relating to an owner or ownership. So what is this guys saying. That now anything with a company behind is is proprietary? Linux has got LMI, so I guess tha…

VPx reference software is open source. The article is not referring to the software but the specification which is developed and published by Google (a private company), as opposed to an open standards consortium like ISO, ITU or the IETF.

VP8 was published as an informational RFC under the IETF, but not as part of a standards track, see "Not All RFCs are Standards": https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1796

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#148

Post by Asbostos »

usrusr wrote: post #145
Asbostos wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point about GPL. Some people advocate for much shorter copyright terms, just enough to make it worthwhile creating the work, like say 20 years. But that would push some GPL software into the public domain, thus damaging the GPL ecosystem by allowing commercial competitors to use the same code.

Pardon me if I have trouble seeing a terrible loss for the GNU ecosystem if releases from 1995 were transferred to the public domain.

There are some very old but hard-to-do-yourself things like compilers, early versions of Linux, etc. Sure it won't be massive, but in the long term it'd slow the ever-growing collection of GPL work, as the old stuff leaks out the back end.

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#149

Post by Asbostos »

ken47 wrote: post #138
Asbostos wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even forbidding killing isn't a natural law. In many societies it has been legal to kill slaves, animals, foreigners, gays, people who break the artificial laws, etc. So killing is often seen as good for society. No laws of property ownership, right to life, right to freedom, etc are natural. They're just things that some societies, sometimes have decided are worth restricting.

To quote the parent to your comment: "Natural laws are laws that any rational nation would arrive at..."

Every country with an armed army or police force would be classed as irrational by that standard.

Re: Thor – A Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec

#150

Post by belorn »

Asbostos wrote: post #148
usrusr wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon me if I have trouble seeing a terrible loss for the GNU ecosystem if releases from 1995 were transferred to the public domain.

There are some very old but hard-to-do-yourself things like compilers, early versions of Linux, etc. Sure it won't be massive, but in the long term it'd slow the ever-growing collection of GPL work, as the old stuff leaks out the back end.

We are talking about works which then has had no patches for 20 years. Even compiles of dead languages do get minor patches over time, if nothing else then to fix memory leaks, crashes, infinitive loops and compatibility with new os kernels. You would for example have to enable low memory address exception in the kernel to run many 20 year old programs, since many programs back then assumed they would start at address space zero, which modern kernel forbids for security reasons.
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