[Theora] Independent implementations?

[Christoph Lampert]

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On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Ralph Giles wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 06:16:49PM +0200, Maik Merten wrote:
>
> > If I understand correctly only On2 has the right to change the licencse.
> > If Xiph did this without permission the source in SVN would clearly
> > (well... IANAL) be illegal. I am very confident Xiph asked for permission.
>
> Of course it was legal to change the license. It's not that we asked
> permission; the donation included a transfer of copyright, so as the
> owners, the Xiph.org Foundation had every right to license it as we
> did. That's why the theora files all have a Xiph.org copyright header,
> rather than On2.

Sorry, that I don't know much about the process how theora evolved. I'm
a MPEG-4 guy normally, working on XviD, and there everything is simple
(because everything is forbidden ;-)

So you got the source code including copyright donated by On2. Did the
donation also include anything like rights to control the patents and give
out free licenses?
Strictly speaking, if you get copyright over code which contains routines
under patents, you of course don't get any rights on the patent by that.
Then, you could have changed the software license to anything you like,
but you could not extend the patent license to everyone.

chl