On Thu, 2010-03-18 at 19:44 +1100, Amos Shapira wrote: > What do people have to say about Skype open-sourcing and submitting > their SILK codec to IETF as a proposed standard > (http://share.skype.com/sites/en/2010/03/advances_in_audio.html)?
The IETF accepts RFCs which require patents in order to implement as long as the submitter provides a patent license on RAND terms. RAND terms without a royalty-free license are of no use for free software. In that respect this small print on the blog post is not promising: > * Use of SILK is subject to the applicable licensing terms. > For more information please contact us. But conversely https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/1164/ says: > Skype is currently contemplating the licensing terms. It is the > intention that there will be a royalty free license option > available to companies implementing the standard. So we will just have to wait and see. In practice, RFCs containing non-RF RAND patents have had a great deal of difficulty progressing down the IETF standards track in recent years (eg, Microsoft's terms for its patents in SenderID doomed the progress of that draft RFC). -- Glen Turner www.gdt.id.au/~gdt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
