Summary of Licenses, fallback system for MCF, etc.

Cheers,

i had a bad discussion with some MCF team members on IRC lately, especially
about the thoughts Steve and me had about a special license for the MCF
logo. I thought it was a good idea to clarify a few things here on the list,
probably because IRC is not the right instrument for such a discussion.

There will be 3 different licenses covering everything around MCF :

1. Specs : MCF is open standard, so the MCF specs  are open and will stay
open for everybody. Everybody and also every company can code their own
implementation of libmcf, and dont have to publish the sourcecode. They only
thing companies will have to do is to put a small credits message into the
documentation, explaining that MCF is an open standard and link to the MCF
homepage.

2. Libraries : We will drop the L-GPL license because it puts pretty high
restrictions to the way people have to handle our libraries, especially
about distributing them with their software. Instead we will create our own
license, being more free than L-GPL, so that companies are allowed to
distribute libmcf with their software products, even without giving the
sourcecode. Similar to the license of the specs they will only be forced to
mention in the software documentation that they are using our libraries, or
a modification of it, and will have to explain what MCF is and link to us.
It is to be discussed if we should also force them to send us the sourcecode
( one time is enough ) if they modify libmcf, so we can check if they are
still within MCF specs, and also can make the mods public.

3. Logo : There is a kind of 'fallback system' for MCF coming along with the
license for the logos, which shall be protected in our ideas :

There is still a chance, even if being really small for the time being, that
MCF gets wide support in a big variety of software products, and maybe even
standalones ( hardware players ) one day. To explain things a bit : if you
go any buy a 'noname' DVD player for 99,- Euro somewhere in the supermarket,
made in China, here is where the money goes ( approximate numbers ) :

25,- - 30,- Euro : end-customer dealer, marketing group, centralized
purchasing for small dealers, etc.
15,- - 20,- Euro : international trading company, caring about import, etc.
; including shipment costs and insurance
10,- Euro : European import tax
16,- - 20,-  Euro : VAT
8,- Euro : license cost to MPEG-LA, including MPEG1/2 video and parsing MPEG
container
2,- Euro : license cost to Fraunhofer for MP3 playback
3,- Euro : use of 'DVD video' logo on the package, to advertise specs
compliancy
2,- Euro : license cost about Dolby AC3 surround, including Dolby logo ( add
something similar about DTS, if supported )

Money left for hardware :

< 20,- Euro / unit !!

If these guys could save some 4 - 5 Euro for not using MPEG container, but
only MPEG4, AC3 and MP3 codecs in an MCF container they could increase their
profit by +10 % immediately !!

Again : this is highly unlikely to ever happen !!

But :

As responsibly acting adults we should have a 'fallback system' to be able
to cope with the situation once it would ever happen ! Please, dont argue
about probabilities now, i know myself its very unlikely to ever happen, but
what do you do if it would happen ? What do you think will sourceforge tell
us if they have 50.000 downloads of libmcf / months ? Read here to learn
more about sf.net limitations :
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gstreamer.devel/329 . Sourceforge
is a great service, but dont overestimate its capabilities !

Back to Logo license :

Once MCF support would really become a 'sales argument' helping companies to
sell their products, whether these were software or hardware players, i cant
see any reason why we shouldnt charge money from them for doing so, so we
were capable of

- paying for the worldwide protection of the MCF logo
- buying some decent hosting, for transor distribution via download-server,
controlled by libmcf
- employ a few people working full time on MCF specs and libraries
maintenance, so the format gets even better

As a result we are planning on creating a special license for the logos.
These license would

- grant free use of the logos for non-commercial apps, forever
- grant free use of the logos for commercial apps, but this could be subject
to change in future ( fallback system )

We could maybe also think about making the general MCF logo free in any
case, but only retain the right to raise fees on the ' MCF special profiles
compliance' logos ....

I hope i could clarify a bit what the original intentions were.

One last question to you :

Would you really have a problem to get money for MCF from SONY ?
Would you really have a problem to get money for MCF from TOSHIBA ?
Would you really have a problem to get money for MCF from ADOBE ?
Would you really have a problem to get money for MCF from CREATIVE ?
etc.

Why should all those companies benefit from our hardwork ? For free !!
--
Christian

Sites : http://mcf.sourceforge.net
http://sf.net/projects/mcf
http://uci.sourceforge.net
MCF mailing lists : news://news.gmane.org
gmane.comp.video.mcf.general
gmane.comp.video.mcf.devel
gmane.comp.video.mcf.mplayer
gmane.comp.video.mcf.announce
gmane.comp.video.mcf.mpc
gmane.comp.video.uci.devel
Soon : www.corecodec.com






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