Hacker News Reader

> 'as long as it's royalty free for _us_ to ship'

The deal makes it free (as in beer) for everybody.

Mozilla could afford licensing H.264 for Firefox long time ago, but they've been fighting for license that allows anybody to build fully-functional Firefox fork (unlike Google — they bought H.264 for closed-source Chrome, but left FOSS Chromium without H.264 playback).

View on HN

>The deal makes it free (as in beer) for everybody.

No, it only makes it free (as in beer) for those who will (and is supported) use the Cisco binary.

Willingness to use it doesn't affect how free (as in beer) it is. It does affect how free (as in speech) it is, but that's not what the grandparent was arguing, and there's a huge difference between the two.

You are now reliant to the benevolence of Cisco to provide binaries for the system of your choice if you want to make use of WebRTC royalty free.

Actually, assuming that MPEG-LA allows this Cisco scheme to happen then any corporation who's at the MPEG-LA yearly cap could offer this same scheme for free (and no cost to themselves) too e.g. possibly Google, Microsoft, Apple.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com