T M M Inc (TMMI)

[zenus]

FrackedUP you obviously have little idea of the business model involved here. There has never been a dispute over original 'ownership' of Iterated's source code for VDK 1.0-1,4. This is about the licensing and proprietary enhancements.

So what if the title to the original Iterated source code had passed to HP. TMMI essentially has a reseller's agreement. They add their own 'special sauce' to the mix, but they pay back royalties to the original holder of the code. That means HP gets a chunk of all sales that TMMI obtains. So long as HP gets a significant amount of revenues from the deal, why would they want to bother to dispute contracts that goes back twenty years?

The best analogy here is like Google developing the Android source code then letting Samsung and HTC develop their own enhancements on top of it and resell it on their cell phones. It's called TouchWiz on Samsung. Google continues to develop new source code for Android but Samsung and HTC owns whatever enhancement they make to it. Now Google does not charge for the license, but they certainly could. In this case, Iterated was in Google's position and gave TMMI an exclusive over the VDK 1.0-1.4 code. The kicker here is that unlike Android which works out of the box, VDK needs TMMI's enhancements to work it's magic.

If Iterated did not negotiate a contract with TMMI that HP is happy with, then maybe a dispute will crop up. But so far there has been no indication that this is the case. Besides, why would they not want TMMI to develop and market the codec when they probably have no interest in further developing the source code.

TMMI's value as a reseller of the technology is their technical expertise, proprietary technology and business connections. All of which should be sufficient now that they corporate clean up has taken place for HP to continue doing business with them.

The critical question here is to what extent is Demented not only misappropriating the license from Iterated but wheter or not they are adding TMMI enhancements in the VDK 2.0 source code which they did NOT develop and NEVER licensed from TMMI. All this will come out in the trial I am sure. So sit back and stop acting like you know everything.