✧✦Catherine✦✧what does it mean for DisplayPort to be "open-source"
what is the source of DisplayPort
is it the standard that says "DISTRIBUTION TO NON-MEMBERS IS PROHIBITED" on every page? is this what we call "open-source" now?
Ariadne Conill 🐰
@whitequark also, like, is displayport even really patent-free? or is this a “just trust me bro” situation?
@ariadne it's explicitly not; VESA will license some of the patents (there are too many to count manually, about a hundred listed in the v2.0 spec) to you under RAND terms
Clifton RoystonRAND, for those not in the know, usually means more or less “We won’t charge your tiny open source project *more* for the patent license fees than we charge a multi-billion international conglomerate.”
@CliftonR @whitequark MP3 patents were available under RAND terms, and yet many distributions avoided MP3 codecs until the patents expired. but i see the same people who were saying “MP3 bad!” also saying “DisplayPort fine!” and it’s just strange to me :)
(i understand from the context of a distribution it’s probably not a detail of concern, but then again you have firmware and training data and so on which get distributed by distributions and maybe those things are threatened by patents, actually?)
Billy O'Neal@ariadne @CliftonR @whitequark My understanding of the differences are:
1. the MP3 patents were asserted long after MP3 became a defacto standard, so the behavior was seen as predatory
Note that this is my recollection, if someone has hard data on the actual timelines here it would be nice.
2. DisplayPort has HDMI right next door as the example of the 'it can be worse program¹'. It's less 'we love everything about DisplayPort' and more 'we love DisplayPort in comparison to the other common standard, HDMI'.
