I am the only Nathan Myhrvold I know of. I don’t think that anybody in the open source software movement has any reason to be afraid of me. My company has never asked open source software developers to pay a royalty, or to cease and desist, or anything of the sort. I am certainly not ashamed of what my company actually does - which is quite different than the hate and fear mongering that some profess.
I could defend myself on those grounds, but this is supposed to a forum for users of Raw Therapee. I am a used of RT. I have a new Canon R5, which is arguably their best camera yet, so yes I think it is a shame that there isn’t better support of the R5.
That deserves a professional reply, not an ad hominem attack.
However, you insinuate that patents are the reason that there is no R5 support in RT, so let’s deal with that.
Are you saying there is a specific Canon patent on the R5 raw format ? If so, then guess what, Canon owns it, not me!
You say it is my actions. So, tell, which action on my part causes large camera companies to file patents? I have news for you - they all do, and they do it for their own competitive reasons, not because of me!
Canon in particular has been making cameras, and filing patents, since 1937. A couple days ago they came out with this news release stating that they have been one of the top US patent holders for a long time.
Seriously, you think that is due to me? No, it is due to competition with Nikon, Sony, and more recently a host of Chinese companies. That’s why all of those companies file patents (including, more recently, Chinese companies.)
Is there really a Canon R5 raw format patent? Unless you find specific patents that cover decoding the format for the R5 then there is no rational reason to use that as a delay.
I rather doubt that there is a Canon patent like that. In part because it is very difficult to patent a file format because, guess what, it’s not novel.
BUT, let’s suppose that there was a Canon patent on the format, and that it was valid (both of which are highly unlikely).
EVEN SO, there is almost certainly no valid claim that Canon could make against somebody reading that format for the purpose of doing raw conversion. That is because patent law reasonably protects the users of the camera. If I am owner of a Canon R5 then Canon would be hard pressed to claim that it was damaged if I chose to use Raw Therapee, a free raw converter, rather than its own FREE raw converter. Where are the damages to Canon? A Canon camera owner is, under US patent law, implicitly granted the right to practice Canon patents to reasonably use the device. That certainly includes using a raw converter.
By extension, there would not be any valid claim against the people writing RT (or software libraries it uses.)
I am not an attorney, but whomever is claiming patents as a reason is (most likely) mistaken due to bad advice. Or alternatively it is a smokescreen / excuse rather than the real reason.