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Google WebM Calls "Open Source" Into Question
snydeq writes "As open source becomes mainstream, vendors are under pressure to market their offerings using the 'open source' brand to the highest degree possible — a trend that may eventually degrade the meaning of 'open source' as we know it, Savio Rodrigues writes. Witness WebM, which Google has positioned as an open alternative to H.264. After examining the software license, some in the open source community have questioned whether WebM should be classified as open source software. Google did not use an OSI-approved license for WebM, meaning that, at least in theory, WebM cannot be considered open source under the OSD — the 'gold standard' by which many government and business open source policies are defined. Moreover, when prodded for OSI review, Google required that the OSI agree to 'changes to how OSI does licenses' as a precursor to submitting a license for OSI review and approval. 'When Google, one of the largest supporters of open source, goes out and purposefully circumvents the OSI, what signal does this send to other vendors? How important is using an OSI-approved license likely to be in the future if other vendors follow Google's lead?'"
An anonymous reader adds: "It turns out that libvpx, Google's VP8 library, isn't compatible with the GPLv2. Google is apparently aware of the problem and working on a solution.
You don't need the OSI to tell you what is open source and what isn't. Read the OSD and the WebM license and see for yourself.
Note that WebM is, however, FSF-approved Free Software.
The FSF is rather more active than the OSI, and is unlikely to, e.g., get its corporate registration suspended just because they were too arse-disabled to get their paperwork in.
We do need some sort of organisation like the OSI, perhaps even the OSI itself. But I'm entirely unsurprised someone would consider the present OSI just not to have its shit together enough to be taken seriously.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
They want a more open process, at least by the e-mail linked. Why is this anything to whine about? I find the request that the OSI attempts to deter the use of the license by others to be somewhat odd though.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Open source has been around a lot longer than Google. The OSI can just continue doing their thing, and everyone will look for the nod from RMS, and nothing will change. Google can of course just use the words "open source" and maybe the OSS fad people who get a kick out of sticking it to the man and not using IE will be led astray, but the open source community isn't a bunch of art students looking for a sleek OPEN SOURCE logo at the bottom of the page, it's a bunch of intelligent developers who already deal with the ins and outs of software licensing and it will remain cognizant of the issues. And maybe many of them will decide that Google's terms are fine, and develop software using this new format. Why is that a bad thing?
The only thing that worries me is that the GPL isn't very flexible when it comes to differences of opinion. One developer's decision to develop software on Google's terms could have huge ramifications for the options available to the project, because everything is GPL'd these days. It's more important than ever to encourage more permissive licensing like the BSD and MIT licenses to give earnest open-source developers the option of disagreeing and the ability to improve OSS.
Microsoft has a "shared source" thing where they will show you the source code for reference purposes (Wikipedia says for viewing Microsoft classes while debugging) but you can't redistribute it. Definitely not open source.
News flash: Google is not God, we don't have to timidly follow their lead.
Well, okay, they are God, but only because so many believe in them. It doesn't have to be that way.
Oh yes! Also, cue the comments about how all religions are like this.
is drowning us in papaerwork.. the burgeoning bureaucracy will grow bigger than the damn government if we let this continue... Make it easy on yourselves and the rest of us please. Just say it ain't open until it's in the public domain.. The one true "license".
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Only a complete idiot would ignore how compatible a license is with other open source licenses. I can in two lines create an open source license that is totally open and totally useless. Watch:
Totally incompatible license v1.0
"You're free to use this code for anything without restriction if any and all code in derivatives is licensed under the Totally incompatible license v1.0"
This obviously meets every definition of the OSI, but it's not compatible with anything, not even the BSD license. It's utterly useless unless you want the whole universe to relicense.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It seems very clear that Google is trying to support open standards and technologies. Different people are going back and forth over licenses and procedures. Everyone seems to be acting in good faith. And there's no reason to believe that it won't all get worked out.
The language in the /. article almost makes it sound like Google is trying to do something like "Embrace and Extend". I just don't think that's what's going on.
If we can move to a place where most video is managed with open technologies, it will be very good for everyone. I'm grateful to the companies who get it, and to people who are trying to figure out the best way to do it. And I don't think the fact that there are small differences of opinion among those folks is a good reason to get upset.
A "BSD" license is open.
Uhm, haven't you just redefined GPL?
This sounds a lot less like 'google calls open source into question' and more 'google calls OSI into question'. I am not immediately seeing anything in this license that makes it sound non-OSS, all it seems to be lacking is the rubber stamp of a particular group within OSS, which is not the same thing. Especially since google's complaints about OSI do not seem to be related to software but instead to process.
Google did not use an OSI-approved license for WebM, meaning that, at least in theory, WebM cannot be considered open source under the OSD
Nonsense. OSI approval is not amongst the criteria in the Open Source Definition. OSI approval is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for meeting the OSD.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
How can a *format* be open sourced? It's like saying that JPG or DOC are "open source". If you're talking about particular implementation, then please be more clear.
As a side note / example:
Statement: "H264 is open source (see x264 project)"
Is true: Y/N?
Open source licences are meant for source code, not for data formats.
I don't care if Google's VP8 library is not strictly speaking open source (or even proprietary), just as long as the WebM format is described in a precise way in a public document, with no patents forbiding me to implement a codec.
In the same way, I would happily buy a proprietary version of Microsoft Word 2013, if only it would save documents in strict ODF format.
I am not a lawyer. Here's the gist. the license is not compatible with:
GPL, GPL2, LGPL2
compatible with:
BSD, MIT
likely compatible with:
Apache, CDDL, Mozilla
unlikely compatible with:
GPL3
This all boils down to the patent clause at the end. It makes further restrictions upon distribution. They are worded in a way that looks to be compatible with Apache and the like, but someone from the FSF should really step in and announce if the two different patent clauses are compatible in GPL3 and WebM license.
That's all that really matters to most, it is not an OSI approved license, since it has not been submitted. That matters to some organizations in choosing a license.
So, every product that claims to be 'green' is equally green for you?
You don't think it would be useful to have some help in determining which ones adhere to practices that are generally considered to be good (or at least, not so bad) for the environment?
I personally am not willing to trust that every claim of green, or open, or whatever is equal, but I don't have time to investigate these things myself, so I appreciate the help of organizations that will help me sort these things out.
I'm not looking for companies or products claiming these titles to be perfect, but without some scrutiny these claims will become meaningless and we won't even know the difference.
I must have been sleeping when the OSI became the sole and deciding arbiter of what was and wasn't open source. Also, most of Google's issues with OSI seem to be that it isn't open enough.
Well, here is what Google was concerned about:
1) We will want a label explicitly deterring the use of the license.
2) We will want the bod list archives open for any discussions of webm. We
are not comfortable with OSI being closed.
3) We need to know OSI's current corporate status. I heard that osi was a
california corporation again, but I would like to know, from the group, that
this is true for 2010 and that there aren't any issues there.
So, they want the OSI to be more open, and they want to discourage the use of the WebM license by others to prevent license sprawl, and they want to verify OSI's corporate status.
Anyone else have a problem with these changes? They seem help everyone.
Within the Transportation Security Administration, the phrase "open source" refers to publicly available versions of various types of documents.
Use a brand new license and people are right to be suspicous.
Licenses are like reading someone else's source code. They're bastard cousins of contracts
and contracts are complicated twisted things specifically engineered to try and screw the
other guy. This is a reason to avoid license proliferation and a reason to stick to what
is well understood. Legal language has consequences.
So the obvious question is why has Google chosen to add to the mix or start from scratch.
What are they up to? What is the motivation that already isn't encapsulated in one of the
pre-existing licenses.
A new license needs to be vetted just like any other legal language.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What if the source is open but not for use?
So the question as to whether or not something is open-source is resolved by trying to figure out what license(s) you can use it under. Yeah, that's everything I currently feel about the open source community in a nutshell. (and yes, I do know what I'm saying there)
I'll second that! I am so sick of the smugness coming from developers who release their code under the GPL. Imagine where we could be if social pressure was instead applied toward making code public domain or at least "BSD" licensed. In particular, this should be the case if the work is funded at all by government grants.
* Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
* Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
* Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
* Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.
Google's license for this software is just an approved BSD license + a narrow patent license. If it'd be open source without the patent license, I'm not at all sure why it wouldn't be open source with an added patent license which is along the spirit of the original license.
This controversy is STUPID. Next we'll hear bitter complaints about how PostgreSQL's not "open source."
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Of course, he convinced some of his license users to release under "Totally incompatible license v1.0 or greater" which means that he can now stick a clause in 2.0 explaining how he owns their souls.
Definitely not open source.
this is my point... it IS open source when "open" is used as an adjective and "source" is used as a noun. you are using "open source" as if it meant something different than the sum of it's parts. it might not be the "open source" that you're talking about, but you can't truthfully say "it's not open source"... the source was made open.
OSI didn't ask for any of this.
Someone who wanted to start developing stuff on top of the library (who happens to be esr) asked for this.
Then some things were said, like "well we're not ready yet" but in a hurried and somewhat non-diplomatic manner.
Then the whole thing blew up just enough for the lid to leave the teapot by about a quarter of an inch before it settled back down.
There is no there there.
So, every product that claims to be 'green' is equally green for you?
Yep, that's analogous to what the parent post claimed. Let's see, your interpretation:
Anyone who claims they are open must be open source.
What the parent actually said:
People who are so pedantic as to nitpick about arbitrary details that define openness are a burden. If the source is open for use, then it's open source. It really is that simple.
You didn't take many classes in proper paraphrasing in high school now did you? Sheesh.
All late-afternoon bitterness, aside, your other point about the help of various organizations to verify claims of openness being a benefit to us all still stands.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Also, I think it's worth noting that the GPL v3 would have to be interpreted to allow substantially compliant licenses to be compatible even if there are minor incompatibilities according to a strict reading. Otherwise, the BSD license would be incompatible because the BSD license cannot be reduced to GPL v3 + additional acceptable terms (the issue here has to do with removal of the "additional permissions" and when that's possible). So I think it's reasonable to assume that two licenses are compatible if no major incompatibilities exist. For that reason I cannot see a case that can be made that this patent clause is incompatible with the GPL v3. At least it's no more incompatible in general than it would be without the patent license.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Whatever the merits of this particular disagreement, the term "open source" is definitely getting diluted in the same way that "organic" and "innovative" have been diluted. I went to a symposium in LA last year about the governor's Free Digital Textbook Initiative. There was quite a mix of people there -- teachers, education bureaucrats, open-source software types, authors of free books, people from hardware companies, and people from traditional textbook publishing houses. Everyone was using "open source" like it was magic pixie dust, sprinkling it on everything to make it seem shinier and better. Pearson's rep referred to the consumable workbook it submitted as "free and open-source" -- actually it's just a PDF file that you can download and print, but that you can't redistribute, modify, etc. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's rep, when questioned about DRM, said that her company was committed to DRM, and envisioned its DRM'd materials being mixed and matched with open-source ones. Both said that they wanted to be service providers (think Red Hat), rather than just content providers (a la Microsoft) -- but, hey, they produce really great content, too. Apple and Dell's reps argued for open formats such as XML.
Part of the reason for the confusion is that people are confused about applying the term to anything other than computer software. When I've mentioned here on slashdot that I was the author of some open-source books, I've sometimes gotten reactions amounting to, "You're an idiot. You don't even know what open source means." This despite the fact that the books are under a GPL-style copyleft license (CC-BY-SA, same as Wikipedia) and their source code (written in a programming language called LaTeX) is openly available and free for redistribution and modification under that license. It sounds like there's similar confusion here because people aren't distinguishing clearly between the issue of WebM as an open format and the implementation of WebM in open-source software. Who the heck cares whether google's reference implementation is open source, as long as the format is openly defined and usable without paying patent royalties? The first implementations of html by NCSA weren't open source according to the modern meaning of the term, but html was certainly an open format.
Find free books.
if you can see it, then it's open. Its not free however. Don't get the 2 confused just because most GPL/BSD/etc code is free and open.
Actually, quite many licenses are GPL-compatible without being the GPL. They tried very hard in the GPLv3 to make more licenses compatible by letting you add various bits:
a) Disclaiming warranty or limiting liability differently from the terms of sections 15 and 16 of this License; or
b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it; or
c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from the original version; or
d) Limiting the use for publicity purposes of names of licensors or authors of the material; or
e) Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some trade names, trademarks, or service marks; or
f) Requiring indemnification of licensors and authors of that material by anyone who conveys the material (or modified versions of it) with contractual assumptions of liability to the recipient, for any liability that these contractual assumptions directly impose on those licensors and authors.
But yes, ultimately the GPL says "no more restrictions". It doesn't matter if those restrictions are a good idea or not, if noone thought to include them in the license text they're not permitted.
Oddly enough, if I look at the GPLv3 under patents there's one word I'm not seeing here:
"Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version."
The word I don't see is "irrevocable". Does this mean Google's patent termination clause is GPLv3-compatible? Good question indeed.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
MPEG-LA doesn't own the patents, they just manage the patent pool and handle the licensing paperwork.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
No, the GPL has a very broad range of OTHER licenses compatible with it. As long as you follow the spirit of the rules, it's unlikely your license will be incompatible with it.
In fact, any free but GPL-incompatible licenses tend to be either borderline free (advertising clause, immutable-but-patchable, etc) or specifically designed to be GPL-incompatible (CDDL, I'm looking at you!).
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Just as "Free Software" does not exclusively mean FSF approved.
So, Google's release doesn't meet one specific definition of "Open Source" doesn't mean that either WebM isn't open source, or that the name or model of "open source" is in question.
It just means that WebM is "open source" by some definitions, but not others.
I see this in the same light as Apple's licensing of Mac OS X as "UNIX". It's just a name. Apple called it "unix" before it was officially licensed as "UNIX". Does that mean that versions before they licensed the name are any less "unix"? Does it mean that because the underlying bits are the same as before, that the current versions aren't really "UNIX" because all they did was license the name?
No, it's just a name. Or in WebM's case, it's just one organization's definition. Some people get too worked up over a simple definition.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I just bought some open source fruit juice. It tasted the same as organic fruit juice, but had an additional 20 cent premium.
or a reasonable change?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Its MS AI and statistics workshop.
Here is the 1999 one:
http://uncertainty99.microsoft.com/
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Microsoft is actually very careful about how it uses the term "open source". It does have some true OSS licenses of its own (e.g. Microsoft Public License), and some projects under those licenses, such as IronPython or IronRuby - and those are referred to as "open source"; while projects where source is available, but modification or redistribution is not allowed, are, as you rightly point out, referred to as "shared source".
So, yeah, I'd say that the difference is fairly mainstream within the industry. While the term "open source" is ambiguous, at this point, using it to mean something other than the OSI definition has a much higher potential to mislead people. I think that the best bet is to only ever use it in OSI sense, but also to capitalize it (i.e. "Open Source", not "open source"), to indicate that it is a well-defined term with a specific meaning to a reader who may not be familiar with it.
Paraphrase: 'this conversation is not of interest to me - so I will ask everyone to stop talking about it'.
You clearly don't understand the implications of licenses, so I would politely point out that this conversation isn't of relevance to *you*, but it is to those who do understand them.
Firstly, the new license Google is using for the project is one that's not been submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval.
[sarcasm]Well, yeah, like that's never happened before.[/sarcasm]
As it stands it possibly can't be approved due to Google's ironic inclusion of a "field of use" restriction in the patent grant (which is restricted to "this implementation of VP8" rather than the more general grant in the Apache license from which the text started). That means WebM is not currently open source,
That's not a field-of-use restriction, and it's a restriction that exists in many other open source licenses as well, even the GPL: you don't get a patent grant in general, you get a patent grant for that implementation and all its derived code.
Secondly, the patent situation around WebM is unclear. Apple's Steve Jobs has previously claimed that the reason Apple does not support Ogg Theora as a video codec on the Mac is that, unlike H.264, Apple can't buy an indemnity to patent action for Theora.
H.264 doesn't come with "indemnity" either, it only comes with promises by other members of the consortium not to sue each other. It's an assumption that there are no other patents, but there is no guarantee.
One H.264 partisan has already asserted there's a patent problem.
Yeah, like that hasn't happened before either. The H.264 patent holders, just like Apple, have an interest in spreading FUD.
Wanting insurance isn't an accusation of infringement. It's just a desire for mitigation of risk in a world where software patents have gone out of control.
Apple can't get "insurance" for H.264 either (well, except from Lloyd's, but they can get that for anything.)
Despite their claims that WebM was been checked for patent risks when ON2 was acquired, Google has neither made its research available nor does it offer a patent indemnity.
Neither does H.264.
Thirdly, as codec consultant Rob Glidden points out, simply making the code for VP8 open source does not automatically make it an open standard.
No, but it's the most open standard there is, and the only thing that keeps it from being completely standard is companies like Apple refusing to support it and spreading FUD.
"When companies like Google ignore standards and go on their own in such important areas as video codec standards, they just undermine the very standards groups the open Web needs to thrive and grow."
There currently is no open video standard, there is only the pseudo-open H.264, which some companies have been pushing because it disadvantages open source.
We need open standards.
Yes, we do. And Apple is to be condemned for preventing the adoption of open standards for video.
"Contributing VP8 to a standards group with a strong patent disclosure policy would be a good corrective move; it would force lurking patent holders to come fully into the public."
Well, and if that makes sense, I'm sure they will do just that. However, it may not make sense if companies like Apple use a standards body simply for spreading FUD. And there's a good chance that they will do that.
Yet Google's do-it-all-ourselves mentality has made them forget or avoid addressing three very important issues - open source licensing, patent indemnity and open standardisation.
(1) Nobody gives you indemnity for any of the video formats.
(2) Google didn't do it themselves, they spent a lot of money on the best vendor of something they could open up.
(3) Standards bodies like ISO, ANSI, ECMA, and IEEE have become corrupted; companies like Microsoft and Apple are using them to obstruct open standards and push patented standards instead.
Is this a library Google themselves have written? Why not just open it up and make it compatible with the GPL version in question? If they want to call it open source isn't that the easiest and fastest way to solve it? Do no evil, not do less evil
*DrugCheese rants*
I'd rather not look at this in terms of what one proprietor does today but across what is possible and what is fair. I think it's unwise to rely on corporate largesse for getting back published improvements to programs I wrote. I shared my published improvements with them, they can share their published improvements with me and do so in a form I have a chance of being able to incorporate into my variant of the program. That sounds fair to me. Leaving it up to proprietors to share and share alike with me is treating a business like a charity which I will not do. I want to be equals with anyone who distributes the program.
Digital Citizen
For those who don't support the GPL, this would enhance Google's reputation, not damage it.
Software nerds suck at marketing. The "Open Source" branding effort uses term which doesn't even mean what it implies, and has a completely different meaning in other contexts (open source intelligence). And plus, it's a common term and can't be trademarked anyway. So every discussion always turns into a endless squabble about definitions, which is exactly the opposite of what they should be achieving.
Of course the alternative, "Free Software" is even worse. Especially because they tend to use as an excuse to bore your brain out with the old "no, free as in libre" speech.
And don't even get me started about "FOSS". I fucking read slashdot and had no idea what that meant for the longest time.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
No, the GPL has a very broad range of OTHER licenses compatible with it. As long as you follow the spirit of the rules, it's unlikely your license will be incompatible with it.
For a rather cherry-picked definition of "compatible."
Ironically, if you consider the entire OSS/Free software community as a macrocosm, GPL projects do exactly what its proponents/zealots claim that it protects against: taking without giving anything back.
It does have some true OSS licenses of its own
A TRUE OSS license will contain the Four Freedoms. IF it does not then it is not a license that would encourage community source code contributions and return improvements back to the community for the benefit of all.
The OSI markets a forest of pseudo Open Source licenses which attempt to hide the few trees that honor the Four Freedoms. Without the Four Freedoms GNU Linux would not have grown to its present popularity and still remain free. One has only to look at the BSD license to see that such a license is just an invitation for proprietary software houses to take, take, take, and without a single thought of returning anything of value to the community except an invoice, DRM and a EULA.
WebM will be exploited by proprietary houses but the license does not require them to do anything to the benefit of the community It does allow them to exploit WebM for profit. Their next step will be to follow Microsoft's behavior and patent their WebM extensions, then make deals with browser writers to incorporate their version of WebM and not the root codec, just the way Microsoft "convinced" peripheral manufacturers to remove the CPUs from their products and make then dependent on the Windows OS for their operation.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I've no idea what you mean about "true OSS", but even FSF recognizes BSD (and similar non-restrictive licenses) as a Free Software license.
In any case, it is not at all clear why the term "open source" should have anything to do with some "four freedoms".
Yes, iIt basically means that you're free to use the patent as long as some other party doesn't have a claim to a patent required to make use of it. The GPL does not allow you to put requirements on a third party that isn't a party to the license. As such, I highly doubt that it doesn't comply with the GPLv3 in that respect. It is irrevocable from Google's perspective, they can't revoke it unless somebody else first finds that the code violates their patent.
There is no tragedy of the commons for information or software. You can use the software all you want and it does not affect my ability to use it as well. Tragedy of the commons is all about degregation of public recourses when no one owns them because everyone takes what they can from it until it is no longer useful to any one.
Umm, this isn't a particularly new license. It's basically the BSD license plus a license for the patents. The patent license is free so long as none of the bits of the format infringe upon somebody else's patent. It's about as simple a license as you can expect, and definitely as simple as you can get while providing patents.
MS-PL and MS-RL are both quite OK with regard to the four freedoms. It's just that they're GPL-incompatible.
What if the source is open but not for use?
Then it gets supported by Steve Jobs.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
And well, it is not like that this will go into something like the Linux kernel or derivative works like BusyBox, so IMO I'd just screw GPLv2 compatiblity and require an upgrade to GPLv3.
You may not propagate or modify a covered work except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to propagate or modify it is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License (including any patent licenses granted under the third paragraph of section 11).
The ONLY reason that Google use a new license is to avoid patent litigation from MPEG-LA or someone else.
The license said that if you filed a patent litigation against anyone using VP8, you'll be unable to use VP8 anymore. If you won't file patent litigations against VP8, you can use it for any purpose.
Since the software patent system is totally broken, Google is doing the right thing to defend.
Of course, there are workarounds if you can't upgrade, just as there are workarounds for linking to any non-GPL compatible library, but the best thing is to upgrade
Very insightful and well articulated.
But why are you posting this as an AC in the comments to some other article? If you were to clean this rant up a bit and write it up a bit more thoroughly, you could submit it to any of a dozen techie and/or FOSS oriented websites/blogs and probably get it published. You might even get paid for it, but that's beside the point. Even if you didn't find a blog willing to print your article, you could put it on your own site. Next, submit a link to it as a story here on Slashdot, which would get your ideas a lot more attention than your AC comment is likely to (I just checked and the poll you linked is still at 15 votes). It is entirely possible to get Slashdotters to make a difference, but it takes a bit more work than just ranting in the comments of random articles.
Don't just complain about lack of mobilization, make it happen!
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
I would need at least one more:
* Freedom 4: The freedom to grant all of these freedoms to anyone you redistribute copies and modified versions to.
He's confusing the four software freedoms with copyleft.
Dilbert RSS feed
Google absolutely knows that WebM is not going to replace ISO MPEG. Apple, Sony, Panasonic, and other consumer electronics companies are not going to use it. Hollywood is not going to use it, the entire toolchain is MPEG. You might as well offer a Linux server admin a free copy of MS-DOS 3.3. Consumers are not going to use it, they have ISO MPEG cameras and camcorders and smartphones and set-tops and can freely make and share video already. MPEG has been working for 20 years. You only pay if you sell it (not use it) and you pay a small fraction of what you would tip a waitress.
Further, even best-case scenario, by the time WebM could be standardized and deployed as widely as MPEG, the H.264 patents will have expired. And the H.264 patent pool is actually desirable compared to WebM's submarine patents. MPEG protects you from patent trolls, WebM doesn't.
So why is Google doing this?
1) WebM gives Mozilla more rope to hang Firefox with. Ogg is just not up to the technical job. Mozilla's suicide needed a clone of H.264 to continue. Chrome will get most of their users as the Web becomes more consumer-oriented and more like interactive TV instead of interactive magazine. Mozilla trained these users on how to install a non-native browser on their system. Google wants them using Chrome on Windows and Mac. But IE9 and Safari will get some of them, too.
2) Confusion around video drives people to YouTube, who have the infrastructure to be format-agnostic. In other words, the lack of standards makes YouTube the de facto standard. If users can't just publish their camcorder movies, or the output of their video editor, or the movies from their smartphone or iPod, then they will go to YouTube and let them handle the extra complexity.
In short, Google can't be hurt by WebM (they are an MPEG licensee and own a massive transcoding video platform) but it can hurt their competitors.
This kind of shit is why we have open, vendor-neutral standards like MPEG in the first place. A big fish like Google or Microsoft is not supposed to piss in the pool like this. WebM is just Google's VC-1, which Microsoft used to kill the high-def DVD market. Yes, MPEG's Blu-Ray won but only a pyrrhic victory.
However; if you didn't pay for it, and can see it, then it is both free and open.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Got a friend who might take credit for something if you ghost wrote it for him/her? (or better yet, collaborate on it and let them take the credit, if you've got someone with similar enough views who is separate enough to safely take the credit) Just an idea - I'm sure there are other possibilities.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
However; if you didn't pay for it, and can see it, then it is both free and open.
But then it's only free as in 'free beer', you are not free to use it as you please so it's not 'free as in freedom'...bloody hell these OSS, FOSS, FSF, terms are irritating.
That sounds more like a Free Software definition than an Open Source definition.
I still want to know where I can find this bloody free beer. The cheapest I can find is $3 a pint.
Personally, I hold that "free" has referred to "without cost" for significantly longer than Stallman's newspeak "as in freedom" when in the context of products. Therefore, I reject Stallman's definition of "free".
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
I still want to know where I can find this bloody free beer.
It's a myth.
Personally, I hold that "free" has referred to "without cost" for significantly longer than Stallman's newspeak "as in freedom" when in the context of products. Therefore, I reject Stallman's definition of "free".
As do 99.9% of people...i can't think of the last time - actually any time - i've told someone something was free and they weren't sure whether i meant cost or freedom, it's always cost.
Not to mention that the reality of Free Software is that it becomes free as in cost anyway, so anyone who worked hard on developing software as a job to put food on the table effectively doesn't get paid during development, the idea is that hopefully they can get paid for support.
Not to mention that the reality of Free Software is that it becomes free as in cost anyway, so anyone who worked hard on developing software as a job to put food on the table effectively doesn't get paid during development, the idea is that hopefully they can get paid for support.
I admit I have tried releasing software as free with source available before. People still expected support if it broke. Guess how much I made in donations and support offerings?
$0.
So as you can see, when those type talk about "making money from support", they're really saying "give me the software for free, because I don't want to pay for it". I don't, however, see a major problem with letting people who pay for the product use the code for their own devices (I refuse to encode my PHP apps).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Exactly! But i can see how the model works for large commercial products, if a large company needs feature X they can employ a group of devs to implement it and the money is made back through the use of that feature. But what if a bunch of individuals need feature X? Who pays for development of it? Does the FSF expect they would all get together and contract out the development to a team?
FSF seems to think developers should work for free (as in cost for the FSF-types who would be confused if i didn't clarify that), what other industry would be happy to do that? I don't think anyone would be happy to provide products for no more than the cost of raw materials and only charge for maintenance.