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nokiatech / heif

High Efficiency Image File Format
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About the license ... #65

Open AndroidDeveloperLB opened 5 years ago

AndroidDeveloperLB commented 5 years ago

I'm not sure about the terms of it. It seems permissive, but is it as permissive as Apache and MIT ? It starts as permissive with every possible thing developers can do with the code, but then it writes this:

For the avoidance of doubt the Licensed Patents shall not include Codec Patents. Codec Patent licenses are neither granted, implied nor otherwise conveyed hereunder.

What does this mean? Do we have to pay for using this repository and/or change it ? Or is it safe?

mirh commented 1 year ago

Permissive? This license is "only to, use, run, modify and copy the software" [within] "the non-commercial purposes of evaluation, testing and academic research". Unless you are a university, anything that isn't "for the lulz" (and only your own) would require an actual dedicated agreement.

AndroidDeveloperLB commented 1 year ago

@mirh I really hate this lawyer language. I wish each would tell what is allowed and what isn't allowed...

mirh commented 1 year ago

That's not even really the bad aspect. It's their [implementation of the] standard, their monkeys at the end of the day.

What's absolutely nuts is that they picked up ISOBMFF, made some more or less conspicuous adjustments to it, and then patented the whole thing or at least some of its parts. Meaning that even everybody and anybody that wanted to do their own thing from scratch, would/could still have to sign an agreement with them. And outside of the license specifically covering this library, there's no other indication on the entire web about their policy with royalties.

AndroidDeveloperLB commented 1 year ago

@mirh I really hate this. I hope each file format that gets patented will be "overthrown" by open sourced alternatives. If they want a patent, they should have it for how they handle the file format. Not how others do it.

In any case, I can't use this unless I pay someone, right?

mirh commented 1 year ago

You could use this for "super innocent" non-commercial purposes I guess? And then there's also libheif. Still, at least back in 2014-2015 Nokia Technologies Oy claimed several patents at RAND licensing terms, as opposed to "free of charge" (plus at most some condition).