Hi Andreas, Andreas Schneider wrote: > Klaus Darilion wrote: >> I wonder how you deal with AMR license restrictions - does Wengo pays >> for the AMR license or is it the users task to get an AMR license? > > WengoPhone is developed in Europe, so we don't have any software patents here. > If the user lives in a country which has software patents like the USA, the > user needs a license to use WengoPhone.
This is probably inaccurate - there are applicable patents for most software in the EU as well (although as of yet, none of them have come before a judge - partly for fear of having the patents struck down, probably). > AMR codecs incorporate several patents, held by Ericsson, Universite de > Sherbrooke (VoiceAge) and Nokia. VoiceAge claims to provide patent portfolio > for AMR codecs. Depending on law in your country, manufacturers and developers > may need to get a license. Because it is a shared library, you may need a > special contract for each one application, which links against this library, > directly or indirectly. First: as a free software project we may not do something like pay for a distribution licence, and not allow our users the same rights we have. So I can confirm that we don't have a licence for the patents. Next: my personal opinion is that we are better off as a project ignoring patent issues until they actually need dealing with. We could distribute handicapped, under-functional, useless software with no patent issues, or we can try to deliver the best softphone that we can which implies codec support, and worry about patents when we need to. I suppose I don't need to add a disclaimer saying "this is not official policy, and does not constitute an acknowledgement that we implement anything covered by patents, blah, blah". But there goes anyway. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary OpenWengo Community Development Manager Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: +33 9 51 13 46 45 Mob: +33 6 28 09 73 11 _______________________________________________ Wengophone-devel mailing list Wengophone-devel@lists.openwengo.com http://dev.openwengo.com/mailman/listinfo/wengophone-devel
