[asterisk-users] Some queries on g729 license.

[Steve Kennedy]

On Mon, Jan 08, 2007 at 10:51:03AM -0500, Al Bochter wrote:

> What about the free open source G729

There's no such thing ... g.729 (as per the ITU specification) is patent
encumbered. Anyone USING the codec has to pay a license to the patent
holders.

Digium have negotiated a bulk-buying agreement and can sub-license (or
relicense - however they've worded their agreement) the codec to end
users.

The same is true for several other codecs like AMR etc. even though
there are open source implementations of them.

MP3 is also patent encumbered, but since so many people were using it
they changed the licensing so that "freeware" players could continue
giving away the implementation. Any commercial software (or hardware)
has to pay license fees (for encoding or decoding).


Steve

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