[Asterisk-Users] Free G.729 ready for download

[Steve Underwood]

Eric Wieling wrote:

>On Fri, 2004-09-24 at 20:33, Steve Underwood wrote:
>  
>
>>It is very difficult to be legally correct with this. The IP holders 
>>don't have simple programs for selling licences in small quantities. If 
>>you buy licences from Digium, they deal with the IP issues on a larger 
>>volume basis. Unless you want to deploy thousands of copies, I doubt you 
>>can find a sane legal arrangement for doing it.
>>    
>>
>
>I've often wondered if you could buy Digium's G729 codec license then
>use a different ACTUAL library for cases where you want G729 on *BSD or
>Sparc or wanted to do specific optimizations to the source.  Would that
>be legal.....
>  
>
I talked with Mark about that a long time ago. I tried what Daniel has 
done this week, as an experiment to see how well the Intel code 
performed by using SIMD instructions. The answer is unclear, but I think 
it works like this: As an end user you are licenced to use the code to 
an agreed extent (number of concurrent instances, or whatever), and that 
licence includes using the patent royalities. That doesn't seem to 
entitle you to use the patents in any other way. The answer seems to be 
that although you are using only the appropriate number of copies, you 
are not allowed to do this.

Regards,
Steve