Per-seat codec licensing for Raspberry Pi

I actually see this as positive thing and disagree with the comment "... Not only does it inflate the effective cost of Pi by some additional amount,". It only increases the cost of the Pi for those that want native support for these decoders and not the base cost of the Pi for those who do not want it e.g. education. Also its only £2.40, its less than the cost of a pint of beer and if the Pi dies and I have to but another one, hey its only £2.40, less than the cost of a pint of beer .... thats something I can accept.

The only slightly annoying thing out of this is that Liz has closed one of the most interesting threads on the Pi forums, the mpeg2 thread. It would have probably died anyway but I don't see any need to close it as what those guys were doing was really interesting to a bystander like me.

Rob

welshblob wrote:

 

It only increases the cost of the Pi for those that want native support for these decoders and not the base cost of the Pi for those who do not want it e.g. education.

While that is certainly true because the extra cost is purely optional (as I clearly noted above), it doesn't recognize a few issues:

• Some schools will inevitably purchase the licenses to have "a fully working Pi".
• The schools that purchase only a few licenses will pay the price of platform divergence.
• The schools that don't purchase licenses on principle will not be able to run all Pi software.
• The extra amount would not be visible at all if it had been covered in the Pi BOM cost.

In other words, this does not appear to have been the most sensible course of action at all.

Morgaine.

OK you stated it was optional in one sentence then condradicted that by saying that the effective cost of the Pi had increased! Make your mind up!

In my opinion schools won't care about mpeg2 licenses. I assume most will be focussed on basic programming on the Pi and any video processing is likely to be with h264 especially as the encoder is now also available and will be used with the soon to be released camera module. h264 appears to be the future codec given its wide adoption which I expect is partly due to its low licensing cost.

You do seem to be tilting at windmills here.

Rob

OK you stated it was optional in one sentence then condradicted that by saying that the effective cost of the Pi had increased! Make your mind up!

In my opinion schools won't care about mpeg2 licenses. I assume most will be focussed on basic programming on the Pi and any video processing is likely to be with h264 especially as the encoder is now also available and will be used with the soon to be released camera module. h264 appears to be the future codec given its wide adoption which I expect is partly due to its low licensing cost.

You do seem to be tilting at windmills here.

Rob

welshblob wrote:

 

OK you stated it was optional in one sentence then condradicted that by saying that the effective cost of the Pi had increased! Make your mind up!

I think this is just a slight misreading of the appropriate paragraph (paragraph 2), as there's nothing sinister or incorrect there.  It's just a matter of context and parsing.  I hope this explanation helps.

Paragraph 2 was about "per-seat licensing" and "not portable from Pi to Pi".  The phrase "inflate the effective cost of Pi" lay between the previous two phrases, and so it should have been clear that this price rise refers exclusively to the extra non-portable cost per seat.  After all, that was the point of the post, it's in the title.  It can only refer to those Pi with the non-portable element, not to any others.

I'll try to be clearer next time.