[vorbis] mp3pro and the mp3 streaming license

[Jack Moffitt]

> So allow me to say that "Changing the patent license on the fly any
> time" is more a vision that fits the OGG perspective and would not be
> the way I'd tell it since this was announced a very long time ago.

It has changed significantly over teh period of their patent.  They gave
us some warning for this one.

> Being the advocate of the devil, as always, I honestly don't know if
> Vorbis is able to change their current "free and open" statute on any
> random day.
> 
> I'm quite sure you won't but what is my guarantee that one day, with
> the help of the "excellent team of legal representatives of Vorbis",
> you'd try to to raise license fees once OGG is mainstream or maybe come with
> "OGG 2.0" or "OGG PLUS" which do try to recover some developing costs
> using license fees?
> 
> I know, that's the last thing on your mind and against the whole
> spirit of the project, but I'm just mentioning this as a
> counter-weight to the claims that Thomson is changing patent license
> agreements on-the-fly.

A simple answer to this:

The code is always there for posterity. It's BSD licensed.

Since we used non-patented things and published our findings, these
ideas remain in the public domain where they should be.  While we
certainly could change teh license on our code, or implement
incompatible versions using patented technologies, what's the point of
that?  

In any case, the current Ogg Vorbis intellectual property is
significantly safe from corruption.

Other implementations of the spec will further insure this.

jack.

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