Re: [codec] A concrete proposal for requirements and testing

["Timothy B. Terriberry" <[e-mail]>]

> I think that the issues of performance requirements and encumbered
> technologies are separate. In fact, the WG charter states "The working group

I strongly disagree with this. Groups like my employer, Mozilla, are 
actually interested in deploying this codec on the internet (you know, 
the purpose for which this working group was formed), in things like 
RTC-Web. Royalty-free is a requirement for us, as well as for the W3C, 
where part of that work is being done. The alternatives are things like 
Speex, iLBC, and G.722, not AMR-NB or AMR-WB (see, for example, 
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=476752#c20).

> cannot explicitly rule out the possibility of adopting encumbered
> technologies". At the end of the day, people will make their own trade-off
> between Opus performance and whether it is encumbered or not. So the
> requirements need to include some reasonable performance targets, and AMR-NB
> and AMR-WB provide those.

This is pure fallacy. You don't need to quote the charter to know that 
the structure of the patent system makes any guarantees impossible. Yet 
if Opus were eventually found to be encumbered, we still couldn't fall 
back to AMR-NB or AMR-WB. If you don't care about such encumbrances, 
then there are plenty of good alternatives, but the lack of them for 
those who do care is one of the reasons this WG was formed. The charter 
states this explicitly.

The charter also mentions the possibility of co-publication of the 
completed codec by the ITU. Now, if you wanted to make such tests a 
requirement for co-publication, that would make perfect sense, but I 
don't believe it makes sense to prevent publication of the codec by this 
WG, regardless of their outcome.