[Asterisk-Dev] G.729 licensing, again..

[Craig Southeren]

On Tue, 15 Mar 2005 15:58:23 -0500
Steve Kann <stevek at stevek.com> wrote:

..deleted

> I contend that it is possible that, if you have paid the appropriate 
> royalties by buying the License rights via Digium, you might be able to 
> run the actual code from Intel instead, assuming you don't exceed the 
> number of licenses you have.  But I haven't seen their license 
> agreement, so I really don't know.

When I spoke to VoiceAge last year, I asked them if their patent
indemnification was specific to their code, or was applicable to any
G.729 implementation. They were very clear that it applied *only* to
their code and could not be transferred to any other codec implementation.

This makes sense when you think about it. 

It is unreasonable to expect that a patent license negotiated for a specific
implementation from company 1 would be applicable to an implementation
from company 2. Quite apart from the issue of why company 1 would *want*
to indemnify products from company 2, there is also the possibility
(probability?) that the company 2 implementation could use a different
patent set than the implementation from company 1, thus rendering the
license either inadequate or overreaching.

In short, I think the answer is no, unless Digium have negotiated a
radically different license from VoiceAge than the one I saw.

   craig


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