[Asterisk-Users] Prices of g729 codec

[trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On Fri, 2006-06-02 at 12:12 -0400, Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:
> The Intel g729 code is licensed for educational use ONLY.  Commercial use is 
> forbidden without paying the patent holder.  $10 a port won't break the bank 
> of any business with a shred of a hope of a chance of surviving, and you stay 
> legitimate.
> 
but $10 only gets you one license, what if you are vonage sized and need
to support a million customers?  What if you accept that you can settle
for a 5:1 ratio, then its only 200,000 or $2M.  Just for codec licenses,
not to mention all the other costs of being a business.  What if you are
smaller than vonage, say 10k channels in use, then that smaller entity,
probably without the hundreds of millions of VC that vonage got you
would have to come up with $100k.  Still more than $10.  

If you are going to bring businesses into it, at least accept that a
business would most likely pay more than $10 for their licensing needs.

And the inten IPP g729 stuff isnt licensed at all, educational or
otherwise.  Read the information from intel on that.  While it is
generally accepted that educational uses can use patents without a
license that doesnt always guarantee that fact.


> Try buying a legit g729 license from the patent holder if you're a home user 
> or small business wanting to transcode g729.  They only want to license 
> hundreds of instances at a time, if not thousands.  Digium negotiated a 
> pretty damn good license fee so that they could offer the codec and sell it 
> in onesie-twosie quantities to little guys like us at an affordable price. 
> 
no its not that they want quantity becuase they will sell just one
license, they only want to deal with people that implement the systems
not the end users of the system.  They claim the reasoning for this is
to make it easier for end users to know that they have licenses -
basically if you have it you are licensed.  Even if that isnt the case.
Check www.sipro.com for more info on g729 licensing.

-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
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