[codec] Collabora's position on the Codec WG

[Sjoerd Simons <sjoerd.simons at collabora.co.uk>]

Collabora Ltd. and Collabora Multimedia support the formation of an IETF open
codecs working group. Standardising best-of-breed audio and video codecs for
use in Internet protocols, that are compatible for use in open source projects
(meaning royalty and patent-free and implementable under a free and open source
software license), will be of extensive benefit to the Internet community.

Collabora Ltd. is the primary developer of the Telepathy real-time instant
messaging framework and the associated Farsight VoIP framework, tools which
allow for the development of, among other things, voice and video communication
clients. Collabora also develops the Empathy instant messaging client, part of
the GNOME Desktop, and now included in many popular GNU/Linux software
distributions (including Fedora and Ubuntu), that uses Telepathy to provide
voice and video calling.

With the exception of the Speex codec, the licenses and obligations of existing
Internet telephony codecs prevent them from being provided as part of a free
and open software distribution; either as part of a GNU/Linux distribution, or
a software package such as Empathy. This significantly raises the barrier for
users to communicate.

We believe that an IETF Working Group will be able to build upon the existing
work done by groups such as Xiph.org to bring standardised, royalty-free codecs
to the wider community. The track record of IPR-free codecs such as Speex,
Vorbis, Theora, Dirac, FLAC and CELT demonstrate that it is possible to develop
good quality, patent-free codecs using an open-source methodology.

Although it can never be completely guaranteed that any given codec certainly
does not infringe on a patent, regardless of the organisation that builds it,
the codecs mentioned above have been available to the public for some time and
are still considered IPR-free. Thus we believe that with sufficient prior
research, patent issues for codecs can be avoided.

By bringing together the relevant stakeholders: codec designers, protocol
engineers, device manufacturers, and framework and application developers; we
believe that significant progress could be made towards standardising a set of
acceptable free and unencumbered protocols to foster much greater
interoperability.

  Robert McQueen (Director Collabora Ltd.)
  Christian Schaller (Director Collabora Multimedia)
  Sjoerd Simons (R&D Lead Collabora Ltd.)