Will The Wild Fox Firefox Fork Disregard Patents?

by Sam Dean - May. 17, 2010Comments (2)

Most of us users of Mozilla's Firefox browser are used to getting new versions of Firefox from Mozilla, but, like many open source projects, Firefox has already been forked into other versions. Now, as OSnews reports, a new fork of the browser is taking shape. Dubbed Wild Fox, one of the more interesting new aspect of it is that it supports the H.264 coded for video. However, the way the new fork treats patents could cause trouble.

According to OSnews:

"Mozilla, sticking to its ideals of the open web, decided long ago that support for the patent-encumbered H264 codec would not be included in any of its products. Not only is H264 wholly incompatible with the open web and free software, it is also incredibly expensive. Mozilla could use one of the open source implementations, but those are not licensed, and the MPEG-LA has been quite clear in that it will sue those who encode or decode H264 content without a license. Software patents, however, are only valid in some parts of the world, so an enterprising developer has started a project that was sure to come eventually: Firefox builds with H264 support."

Also, according to the Wild Fox page:

"The Wild Fox project ('Wild Fox', or Wx for short), is a project aimed at releasing builds of Firefox which include features the Firefox builds do not include, including AVC (h.264) support with HTML 5 video. To this end the currently stable Firefox 3.6.3 source code is used and modified to include a decoder for AVC."

While there isn't any code for Wild Fox available yet, users in many parts of the world where patents are treated differently than they are in the U.S. may reach for it. If you've been following the codec wars, though, you've seen the threats being thrown around surrounding patents. As Wild Fox comes to fruition, it will be wisest to closely monitor how it treats patented technologies.