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Firefox With H.264 HTML 5 Support = Wild Fox
Elledan writes "Two countries have software patents which make it impossible to freely use video codecs such as AVC (H.264). This has led to projects such as Firefox not including AVC support with the HTML 5 video tag in their releases, which makes the rest of the world suffer indirectly the effects of software patents as well. To rectify this situation at least somewhat, I have created the Wild Fox project, which aims to release Firefox builds with the features previously excluded due to software patents. This software will be available to those in non-software-patent-encumbered countries. Any developers who wish to join the project are more than welcome."
Now first of all to the Wild Fox project maintainers, this is the right move. Fight to win the whole war, not one battle. Don't die as a martyr and lose it all just by demanding something to happen right now.
Additionally, it looks like Firefox is actually starting to lose support even from the Open Source front. Even Ubuntu is probably changing to Chronium and dropping Firefox. It kind of looks like Firefox lost the track of what they were doing a long time ago.
Apparently Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution, is considering dropping Firefox for Chrome. ...
it could be a sign that people are starting to feel less, um, “loyalty” to Firefox.
Not that I'm anymore happier Google's products taking over everything...
The whole concept of patents is to protect the patent inventor against competition and give him or her a monopoly. 'Patents are anticompetitive' is a tautology. It never in the past therefore was considered a valid argument against patents.
yes, thatanewword.
Hmm, is that a malamanteau ?
If Ubuntu omits Firefox, it will be the first thing I do on any new version, is remove Chromium, and to manually install Firefox.
Until Chromium has addons like Firefox I'm not interested in using it. If they actually go with Chrome, that will be a joke. I actually value my privacy rights, and I don't want Google's browser snooping on me, and reporting my web usage to their advertising servers.
"Only two countries in the world have software patents"
That's not exactly accurate - MPEG LA has been granted patients in numerous countries: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020400.html
---- Don't lick something unless you really mean it.
It's defensible because someone had to do the research to figure out the H.264 algorithms. In retrospect, it's easy to say "Duh, of course quarter-pixel motion estimation is a good idea", but someone had to do a lot of grunt work to prove that's really the case.
I'm quite certain math geeks are beavering away at new compression algorithms in corporate labs. Much of that research will screech to a halt if there's no prospect of making money licensing the resulting patents. Not all of it, just a lot. So the benefit to society is we get a 2160i video standard this decade, not next. Is that worth it? I don't know, maybe, but it's not cut and dried.
This is a technological work-around for a legal problem.
When the music industry shut down Napster, some clever programmers wrote up distributed filesharing applications. Hooray, right? Well, no, then the lawyers and the CEOs and the lobbyists went crying to the legislators. And one by one, each country started enacting stricter and stricter copyright laws. Grandmothers are being thrown in prison. Citizens are being fined thousands for a half dozen song downloads. Pirating has reached social acceptance, but hey, so has pot smoking. Social acceptance hasn't changed the fact that your government can throw you in jail at any minute.
Look at the story of The Pirate Bay. We're running out of safe havens, because "routing around" is so much easier than making a stand in your own country, against your own government. Who really wants to go down to their local state/federal legislature and march and protest for the "right to copy data"? Most of us just fileshare for the sake of having some good entertainment to watch in the evening. It's hard to get worked up over relaxation. We don't want to have to work at getting our entertainment, so let's just route around and hope the lawyers don't catch me.
Somewhat related example: China builds a firewall. The clever computer nerds know how to get around it, but for fear of imprisonment, they can't go around blabbing the details. Their own neighbors will turn them in at the drop of a hat. As a result, political dissidence remains horribly unorganized and ineffective. The tools are there, but it doesn't matter, because no one can use them for anything bigger than reading Western newspapers or downloading porn.
Routing around doesn't fix anything. If anything, it releases just enough steam that the public's anger never reaches the critical point to turn around these abominable laws. Quit bragging, about your clever programming tricks. They won't help you when the government/corporations own the tubes, the clients, the servers, and the courts.
All this is doing is making H.264 standard and this is going to kill Linux and Firefox once the lawyers come out when it monopolizes the market.
This patent bs has got to stop. If enough users (firefox users) do not support it then we have a fighting chance to fight it.
http://saveie6.com/
The whole concept of patents is to protect the patent inventor against competition and give him or her a monopoly.
You've got the method, but you don't have the purpose. The purpose for patents is to spur the sharing of inventive ideas for the benefit of society. See, before patents, ideas would generally be held as trade secrets by guilds. Often times these ideas would die, never to see the light of day, if the guild wasn't in a position to make use of them. This severely hampered innovation.
We want to get these innovations to be spread and known as widely as possible. This allows for the fastest implementation of those ideas, as well as speeding up the process of new innovations which are founded by those same ideas.
So, how do you make it so that everybody knows how the latest innovation works, yet still allow the inventor to extract sufficient profit out of the invention to make it worth the effort (and therefore worth inventing the next great thing)?
Simple, you give him a limited guaranteed monopoly that is long enough to extract most of the value from the invention, but make him describe his invention in detail such that another competent engineer could recreate the device. Then, the next great widget can be invented based on the revelations of the previous great widget, regardless of whether or not the new inventor is the same person as the old. Also, it gives the inventor of such a widget many options for monetizing his invention so that he can afford to create new inventions.
The purpose of patents is to benefit society. It is not to benefit inventors. We dangle the carrot of a limited monopoly to encourage as much invention as possible, but the success of the inventor is not the goal of patents. Spread of knowledge is the goal of patents. This is the same goal as copyrights, by the way.
Any time you see someone attempting to limit the spread of knowledge via patents or copyrights, you know immediately that they are working counter to the goals of copyrights and patents.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Firefox has a large enough install base to actually stop or at least slow down H.264 adaption.
The geek refuses to look beyond the browser.
Firefox is roadkill. Little Dolly Dumpling tied to the railroad tracks.
H.264 has the support of 817 of the biggest names in global manufacturing: Fujitsu. LG. Mitsubishi. Panasonic. Philips. Samsung. Toshiba...
In cable, broadcast and sattelite distribution. In CCTV.
In home video.
In PCs. In cell phones. In mobile devices of every sort.
It is backed by Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft - and Canonical.
Software patents literally make these open source projects illegal
The context you skipped was speaking directly to OSS H264 implementations. A patent does not *force* the patent holder to be anti-OSS, but if the patent holder doesn't explicitly grant that liberty, then the OSS project distribution in geographies where the patents apply are illegal and are liable. You may argue that this should be the right of the patent holder to make these restrictions, but don't pretend that all software patent holders are just fine with OSS and that it has no impact.
Let me ask you, how many people has the MPEG-LA sued over h264 ... there are OSS implementations ... how many of them have been sued? I can count to one higher on my dick, so just stop with the retarded bullshit you're pulling out of your ass.
That argument could have been made about GIF and VFAT for *years* before the respective companies started going after their royalties with force. One of the devious things about patents is that they can be 'submarined' while the industry standardizes on it and then the holders can raise their hands and make demands upon the whole industry. In cases like Novell and RedHat where they explicitly license their patents, its ok. For closed/open projects that explicitly get signoff from a patent holder, they are ok. In the case of H264, there are clear demands as to how to legally license that are ignored by many who are *currently* ignored in turn as the holders think it the best current business course of action. Because of the overall soft stance in the community on h264 licensing, they reap the benefits of open source implementations as validating it as a standard while not incurring the risk of losing their right to sue by explicitly granting rights.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.