Too bad they're not making this plain open source They should copyleft all the IP in this which will foster innovation on the algo instead of just basing this on customer needs Open algos are much easier to extend.
Read the fourth bullet: "Use a patent license that encourages adoption and discourages defection."
It sounds like they are planning on a copyleft-style defensive patent licensing system.
Right now, one of the big reasons that open codecs like VP8 and VP9 don't see wider adoption is that there's a lot of FUD thrown around by people saying "they might infringe H.264/HEVC patents, it's too risky to use them without a patent licensing pool."
By filing patents of their own, and offering them under a free (libre) license that has a clause causing it to be revoked if you engage in some other related patent litigation, this adds pressure against anyone trying to use their patents against someone using Daala.
Not sure how well this would work out in practice; I know that some people have gotten patents under these kinds of defensive open patent licenses before, but I don't know if they've ever been used defensively in practice before.
So you're saying in practice copyleft and hence open source doesn't really work, you have to patent and then license for free to protect your users. How does this impact innovation based on the ideas you have patented?
We've talked about making a GPLv3 release to at least open up the patents we control to all copyleft software. But there are important details to work through, and like most FLOSS projects we have more things to do than people to do them, so it hasn't happened yet. If someone needed it to happen it should be a pretty easy conversation to have.
Keep in mind also, our goal is generally to stay out of court. See above about having too much to do.
