I think they are concerned that there may still be some unexplored patents which apply to Opus. If they don't track the numbers, then they may need to pay the absolute maximum license fee to a (future, unknown) patent holder because they can't bound the number of licensees.
That is, of course, assuming there are still IP issues. I'm not sure what made them concerned about that, if anything tangible.
Notably, the Opus license is voided when you enter Opus-related patent litigation with an Opus user. I think many(most?) companies which hold patents relevant to Opus also license Opus for their products; so they would be trading patent litigation for copyright litigation.
From the Opus licensing page¹:
When it comes to patents, it is difficult to say much without making lawyers nervous. However, we can say something quite direct: external counsel Dergosits & Noah has advised us that Opus can be implemented without the need to license the patents disclosed by Qualcomm, Huawei, France Telecom, or Ericsson. We can also say that Mozilla is confident enough in Opus to ship it to hundreds of millions of Firefox users. Similarly, Cisco and Google are also supporting Opus in some products. More companies are expected to do the same soon.
Mozilla invested significant legal resources into avoiding known patent thickets when designing Opus. Whenever possible, we used processes and methods that have been long known in the field and which are considered patent-free. In addition, we filed numerous patent applications on the new things we invented to help defend the Opus community. As a result, Opus is available on a royalty-free basis and can be deployed by anyone, including other open-source projects. Everyone knows this is an incredibly challenging legal environment to operate in, but we think we’ve succeeded.
I think they are referring to the non-litigation clause in the Opus license. Oracle probably charges extra for taking on the burden of potentially not litigating because of that license.
We asked some folks at Oracle about this, and my understanding is that this fee is imposed by the vendor providing the Opus implementation for their DSPs. Oracle is just passing on this cost. A specific implementation may, of course, include technology which has additional licensing or fee structures on top of the basic royalty-free license used with the reference implementation.
I doubt it, Digium is scared of patents but the SFLC seriously considered going to court to get the known patent declarations declared invalid. If someone had gone after Digium, I'm sure the SFLC would love to hear about it.
FTFA: "...we have to distribute Opus as a free binary... can’t distribute it as source. And, once a day, it has to anonymously report back to Digium"
Binary blob only, and phones home? Even if it is an attempt to put an upper bound on (unlikely) royalty payments to a third party, this really smells bad.
'In order to lessen the risk of future legal action, the codec reports anonymous stats to Digium once per day that contain the maximum number of simultaneous opus channels in the past 24 hours. Again, totally anonymous. We don't even record ip address, just a uuid and count.'
Surely not ideal but the data sent 'home' are minimal and as anonymous as possible. What really smells bad in this and similar cases is the madness surrounding the whole software patent legislation.
For those who still like to prevent the module from reporting any data more details can be found here: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-dev/2016-Septembe...
Depends on what you mean by 'modern'. You may as well ask "Does any modern messaging app use XMPP?" Consumer facing open protocols are going extinct in favor of walled gardens and closed markets.
Likely, as soon as it exist the browser-to-browser thing. A SIP back-end may not be the cool thing you advertise on the app store, but it is battle-tested and scales carrier-grade.
Or you could just use FreeSWITCH, We've had OPUS for a long time, full WebRTC stack, and full Video MCU / Transcoding features. http://www.freeswitch.org
I understand Digiums concerns, but I feel they aren't warranted. There are open source equivelent patches out there to accomplish OPUS in Asterisk without the phone home element.
19 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 52.8 ms ] threadThat is, of course, assuming there are still IP issues. I'm not sure what made them concerned about that, if anything tangible.
Notably, the Opus license is voided when you enter Opus-related patent litigation with an Opus user. I think many(most?) companies which hold patents relevant to Opus also license Opus for their products; so they would be trading patent litigation for copyright litigation.
From the Opus licensing page¹:
When it comes to patents, it is difficult to say much without making lawyers nervous. However, we can say something quite direct: external counsel Dergosits & Noah has advised us that Opus can be implemented without the need to license the patents disclosed by Qualcomm, Huawei, France Telecom, or Ericsson. We can also say that Mozilla is confident enough in Opus to ship it to hundreds of millions of Firefox users. Similarly, Cisco and Google are also supporting Opus in some products. More companies are expected to do the same soon.
Mozilla invested significant legal resources into avoiding known patent thickets when designing Opus. Whenever possible, we used processes and methods that have been long known in the field and which are considered patent-free. In addition, we filed numerous patent applications on the new things we invented to help defend the Opus community. As a result, Opus is available on a royalty-free basis and can be deployed by anyone, including other open-source projects. Everyone knows this is an incredibly challenging legal environment to operate in, but we think we’ve succeeded.
1. http://www.opus-codec.org/license/
> Transcoding the Opus codec requires a special license as it is subject to a royalty agreement.
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E61547_01/doc/esbc_ecz730_mainten...
Binary blob only, and phones home? Even if it is an attempt to put an upper bound on (unlikely) royalty payments to a third party, this really smells bad.
'In order to lessen the risk of future legal action, the codec reports anonymous stats to Digium once per day that contain the maximum number of simultaneous opus channels in the past 24 hours. Again, totally anonymous. We don't even record ip address, just a uuid and count.'
Surely not ideal but the data sent 'home' are minimal and as anonymous as possible. What really smells bad in this and similar cases is the madness surrounding the whole software patent legislation. For those who still like to prevent the module from reporting any data more details can be found here: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-dev/2016-Septembe...
I understand Digiums concerns, but I feel they aren't warranted. There are open source equivelent patches out there to accomplish OPUS in Asterisk without the phone home element.
/b