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Microsoft's HD Photo to Become JPEG Standard?
Mortimer.CA writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft has submitted their HD Photo to the JPEG committee: 'Microsoft's ongoing attempt to establish its own photo format as a JPEG alternative (and potential successor) took another step forward today when the JPEG standards group agreed to consider HD Photo (originally named Windows Media Photo) as a standard. If successful, the new file standard will be known as JPEG XR.' Microsoft has made a 'commitment to make its patents that are required to implement the specification available without charge.' While JPEG 2000 exists, HD Photo has several advantages (not the least of which is a lot less CPU power is needed). Is this a big of an issue as ODF/OOXML?"
If the specification is as free as ASCII, to use one example, then there is nothing wrong in adopting that as a standard.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
If they are truly interested in making the patents "available", they would simply surrender the patents into the public domain. Since they have not done this, assume they will not always make the patents "available" to everyone or will have special cases where it is not available (for example, to extend the specification, or to set up a company that certifies HD Photo implementations, or "no government use without paying us", etc).
Well, here's a thought --
... (etc etc etc, filler nonsense here.)" ..?
They say, "One important aspect regarding the standardization of HD Photo is Microsoft's commitment to make its patents that are required to implement the specification available without charge."
"Alright, fair enough," I think, but then I wonder: "So, what's the application process like, and what are the licensing requirements?"
Might they say something like, "Oh, it's available free of charge, but you can't use it in an OpenSource / FreeSoftware project, because that's uncontrolled, there's no telling what liabilities we'll be exposed to, for letting you implement this,
Maybe that's "the trick" here?
Come on Microsoft! Stop making things so complicated.
Please just make the freaking standard open and available.
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
Y'know, I've been reading the comments on Slashdot for years now, and I've noticed that a lot of people tend to label anything Microsoft submits to ISO or SMPTE or ECMA or whomever as "evil". So I guess this begs the question: if and when one of these standards is actually ratified as a "standard", what makes it less of a standard than some other competing standard? ITU's H.264 vs SMPTE's VC-1 (better known as Windows Media Video 9)?
If MS gives away all rights to the format spec and any algorithms required to use it, fine. JPEG can declare particular implementations in compliance or not. Otherwise, no way.
Most importantly, lossless compression might mean that you don't need to shoot in RAW all the time, and be at the camera manufacturer's mercy.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
I think JPEGs would be a damn hard standard to overcome. They tried it with PNGs to overcome the GIF legal encumbrances, but just what percentage of images out there in the wild are PNGs?
Quite frankly, I think JPEGs as they stand are too far along now for something that, with modern CPU power, offers an almost imperceptible advantage, to get any traction. Ten years ago, when computers and the Internet were slower, they might have had a chance, but now, no way.
There are too many real things to hate and fear Microsoft over. This appears to me to be a nonstarter, sort of like MSN has turned out to be for web searching.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Gentoo Sucks
If there are restrictions, Microsoft's HD photo will go the way of the GIF format.
> Microsoft has made a 'commitment to make its patents that are required to implement the
> specification available without charge.'
Ok
> While JPEG 2000 exists, HD Photo has several advantages (not the least of which is a lot less CPU power is needed).
Has anybody checked that the more efficient algorithms are among those in the patents to be released? What if they're hiding a patentable, very efficient decompression version, which they'll "discover" and patent, after this becomes the standard?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Well, the inability to use it in GPL v2/3 code would be the evil part that the OP was referring to. There you go.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I won't speak to the potential for "legal wrangling", but regarding "politics", if this does get bogged down in politics then you can bet that it'll be the anything-but-Microsoft folks that are to blame. Hell, this very subthread starts with a post saying that this format should be rejected just because it comes from Microsoft, regardless of the merits and regardless of how liberal the license is. In other words, the format should be rejected on the basis of politics. The same BS that goes on in the ODF vs OOXML debates (the reality is that 90% of that debate is politics BS, not technical merits).
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Well, there are not many PNGs in the wild because IE6 does not support its alpha channel. Thus, there is no real reason to switch to PNG (although having a full color palette is nice by itself), especially concidering the hoops you have to jump through to get the file sizes down to the same size as a .gif (you need to use tools outside of GIMP/Photoshop such as optipng and pngnq). Web designers (I am, unfortunately, one of them) know how easy it would be to make slick looking websites using images with alpha channel (just having aliased edges for your logos is a huge advantage), but we don't use it because around 60% of our users can't render them properly. IE7 does support the alpha channel (finally) and all the other major browsers have supported it for years. As soon as IE6 falls below 5% market share (or so), people like me will start using PNGs very frequently.
.gifs, I promise you that, unless something better comes along between now and the time it takes for IE6 to die.
They will replace
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
I would imagine much of this distrust stems from Microsoft's tendency to stifle competition and get away with it. That is not to say that this move of theirs isn't appropriate, genuine, or truly innovative. Once you've been bitten once (or several times), you tend to look at the person biting you with a more cautious eye and wonder if/how/when they're going to bite you again.
This can only end badly.
Look, I dislike Microsoft just as much as anyone else, but that comment is just ill informed. Just because M$ might stand to make money off a deal does not mean it will "end badly." In the vast majority of industries, consumers gain when companies do something just to make money. Just because M$ in the past has found ones of making money that have been harmful to us doesn't mean it will be the case this time.
Thank God for evolution.
As I understand it, the reason for the politics in ODF/OOXML is that technical factors bring in politics. OOXML allows documents to contain chunks that look like mumble, where mumble is a binary dump of a Word 97 document. This is, of course, a technical matter, a detail of the specification. However, since Word 97 format is not itself open in the slightest (a political matter, openness), this particular technical matter drags in politics in a big way.
OTOH, this political matter, lack of openness, drags in technical problems as well. A spec which is not open must be reverse engineered (and even then there is dubious legality), so only those who have access to the closed spec will necessarily be able to implement it correctly. This tilts the playing field for the software market heavily in favor of those with access to the closed spec. Any competitors will find that either their software fails to function correctly, or they have to do a lot more work to get correctly functioning software. The result: either a monoculture/monopoly in software using this spec, or a variety of incompatible attempts at implementing the spec, resulting in inability to carry files from one computer to another and expect them to still work.
So, a technical matter in the OOXML spec results in political wrangling, which wrangling is motivated by technical reasons anyways. Dig a little bit deeper than most people are willing to, and you find that it really isn't a matter (for most people) of Anything-But-Microsoft. It may look that way, because MS offerings are so consistently rejected, but nearly always, it is actually for technical reasons (perhaps technical by way of political in the middle, but technical at both ends (motivation for objection, and object of objection)).
Now, the OP who said "we should reject this just because it is from MS" might be a true Anything-But-Microsoft person. That would certainly explain the remark. OTOH, caution, a look at history, and an understanding of the technical matters involved in said history would also explain the remark quite easily. The reference to MS' "track record" suggests to me that perhaps the latter explanation is the right one. But then again, I'm an eternal optimist, always seeking to think the best of people until I actually have a real reason to think otherwise.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
I know nothing about the spec, but maybe it is something like it opens three times faster with DirectX than it does with compiles for Mac and Linux? Getting people to put something like that as a default format for cameras to use would give MS a competitive advantage but still be something that others could use free.
Holy Cow. We just lived through a decade of that kind of behavior and you didn't notice? mp3Pro (so what) is licensable just like MP3, JPEG and everything else. Thomson never offered MP3 encoders up for free then suddenly demand royalties once MP3 got traction. Thomson always required a license. They did, however, suddenly demand a license for MP3 decoders. They're all greedy bastards. Submarine ransom demands are a great side business for Microsoft as well and everything they release is another opportunity to collect undue cash:
I'm no expert on their activities but this is a common historical pattern that nearly anyone can see (do you read Slashdot by any chance?). I've even been stung directly by their behavior and have seen the difference between profiting from your effort and profiteering off your victims. For the last decade, Microsoft has held back real progress by co-opting rising technologies, modifying them a little to make sure their competitors fail, and re-releasing a crudely inferior shadow of the original. The original technology is now overwhelmed and eliminated by their own version. Interoperability was never in Microsoft's interest. That's how a lot of dreams ended. Developers and users were simply upgrading their handcuffs with each new release of Microsoft "technology". Now, Microsoft is being dragged backwards through their own stew. The last resort is trying to control competition through patent infringement threats and forging deals with unlikely allies in order to threaten the rest of their competitors who didn't sign a pact with them. There's no innovation going on there. They're even trying to capture some of the OpenSource halo by calling proprietary technologies "Open" in an attempt to tie the word to Microsoft in the eyes of people who don't know any better.
Ach. Look at the time...
Most of the stuff on