If Broadcom wants to come clean and admit that the 'MPEG2 License Fee' is really a direct payment to them to license the MPEG2 hardware decoder firmware GPU driver, then that's fine - but I wouldn't recommend this for a number of reasons.įirst, it will reignite the whole debate about the closed source nature of this firmware and whether it violates the Linux open source licensing provisions, because given a choice, I would prefer a free open source GPU video driver, but that is not possible because of Broadcom does not make enough information available to allow the development of open source drivers.

something is either covered by a patent or it's NOT so misrepresenting the status and collecting a fraudulent 'licensing fee' is a REALLY BAD IDEA. Just to be absolutly unambiguously crystal clear, the MPEG2 patents HAVE expired in the US, Europe, and UK where 99.99999 percent of the Raspberry Pi's are sold - which makes misrepresenting this LICENSE FEE you are charging as required by a patent licensing a blatant case of consumer FRAUD.īroadcom sued Qualcom over their claim that Qualcom had missrepresented whether something was covered by a by a patent - i.e. all those that involved technology that the Pi actually needed to decode MPEG2 program streams) - but was told then that due to the intricacies of how patent royalty agreements work, we would have to wait until ALL the legally applicable patents in the pool have expired - AND NOW THEY HAVE. I have been patient, in the past when I pointed out that ALL the RELEVANT MPEG 2 patents had expired a year ago (I.e.

Raspberry pi mpeg license key generator