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China Proposes Rival Video Format
Richard Finney writes "Yahoo News is reporting that
the Chinese government is supporting an effort to develop a homegrown standard, called 'AVS,' for compressing digital audio and video in order to avoid paying royalties
on proprietary compression schemes.
The AVS groups website is online but in Chinese."
In case anybody else hasn't noticed, China is turning out to be -- in fact, already is, simply by its sheer size -- the world's largest booster of open source and royalty-free hardware and software in the world. Open Source and Free Software movements couldn't ask for a more powerful force to have on their side, and they are consistently expanding and improving what they offer -- first Red Flag Linux, then the dragon chip, and now this. Woo!
The Chinese seem determined to avoid patent issues by developing their own chips, and now their own video formats.
The intellectual property laws that were supposed to guarantee our technology a dominant position may, in practice, be shutting U.S. companies out of future marketplaces, as tech customers seek a way around excessive royalties and restrictions.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
Communism may not be a good fit with physical goods and commodities and stuff like that, but I think China is setting a good example with intangible, non-rivalrous goods (IP). Once they design a chip, or a video compression scheme, no one can exhaust its usefulness. This is a good thing.
Now don't think I'm going so far out there. We have similar ideas here, and we at least pretend to practice them. That's the idea behind University research and stuff like that (at least before universities had the right to own the products of their research).
Here in America, I think we need more research done for the public benefit, paid with public money. There are so many intricacies to the vision I have, and I can anticipate many objections, but I'm not going to write a whole long post here. I'm just making a positive suggestion here.
...you cheer on a country with such a horrid human rights record simply because its software ideals appear to align with your own.
I admire their technical prowess, but they're not doing it with the good of humanity in mind. It's all about proving that they're not trapped in luohouzhuyi, literally "fall-behind-ism." They've failed as a communist party, so now the only thing keeping them in power is trying to prove that they're making China strong enough to resist foreign interference. That's what this project feels like to me.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
This is why we need to support Open-Source lobbying efforts. Right now, sending a native Chinese lobbyist to push China to adopt the work of the Ogg team as their official standards would be a great coup for the Open Source movement.
China never really has gotten over that "we are the center of the earth" mentality have they?
In my experience the USA has the same problem at times.
... glass houses, stones, etc...
/.r who pointed out that whilst China's gov is slowly getting better, ours is quite quickly getting worse.
Let's just say that your local media is more likely to tell you that another country is Bad(tm) then tell you about the stuff your own country is up to.
I'm not condoning any form of human rights abuse, I'd really like to live in a nice, happy, peaceful world, but let's face it; the west is not exactly utopia either. I saw a post around here the other day from a chinese
Warning: May contain nuts