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Ars Thinks Google Takes a Step Backwards For Openness
An anonymous reader writes "Over at Ars Technica, Peter (not so) Bright gives a long-winded four pages of FUD about how Chrome dropping support for H.264 is a slight against openness. 'The promise of HTML5's video tag was a simple one: to allow web pages to contain embedded video without the need for plugins. With the decision to remove support for the widespread H.264 codec from future versions of Chrome, Google has undermined this widely-anticipated feature. The company is claiming that it wants to support "open codecs" instead, and so from now on will support only two formats: its own WebM codec, and Theora. ... The reason Google has given for this change is that WebM (which pairs VP8 video with Vorbis audio) and Theora are "open codecs" and H.264 apparently isn't. ... H.264 is unambiguously open.'"
Peter (not so) Bright gives a long winded, read 4 pages of FUD
I come to slashdot for the articles but stay for one-sided submission summaries.
Not that I support Google's move but, come on, this is summary is a troll unto itself.
Trolling is a art,
Be sure to pay your $699 H.264 licensing fee, you cocksmoking teabagger!
I just don't understand the bit of reasoning Peter Bright made about why Google dropping H.264 is a bad thing because they may incur licensing fees. Especially this last bit:
It's not as if Google can't afford the $6.5 million a year, and by paying that money the company would enable web users to view open, standards-compliant, H.264 video.
What, just because a company can afford the licensing fees means that it MUST pay the licensing fees, especially in the face of other open source alternatives that doesn't require them?
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You can argue that it is a step backwards for "openness", or, you can argue that Google is digging their feet in to ensure that their own 'truly open' video format will become the standard. Both POV's have validity but WebM is probably better for consumers in the long run.
H264 is not open, it is patent encumbered, it will not be open until all relevant (a word which has become very stretched recently) patents have expired. The Ars article tries to address this by claiming that there are no royalties that need to be paid for videos that can be accessed without a paywall; yet the document they cite says this is only for "0 - 100,000 units" which clearly creates a problem for libre software that has millions of users. Furthermore, the line that the licensing terms draws for "(a)" and "(b)" sublicensing is artificial and wholly incompatible with free software licensing.
Palm trees and 8
Although very crudely worded, "Anonymous Coward" is right. H.264 is created to make money. By Google removing support for H.264, it pushes for an actual open standard. If Chrome and Mozilla had support for H.264, and IE only supported H.264, then everyone would have to pay the licensing fee.
If however, Google and Mozilla remove support for H.264 and only support open codecs, Microsoft will be forced to adopt open standards as well, rather than slamming Google for "imposing a language on the world," as they've tried to do many times in the past.
This is a step for openness on the server side. Although it looks like it's removing options, it is actually forcing options by forcing Microsoft to play nicely.
so there is nothing left to talk about. i am creeped out like any one else about google's increasing ability to know everything about our lives, but in this case, google did the right thing in the name of openness by denying H.264
good job google, thank you. ignore the paid prostitutes howling about not including H.264. we who have genuine opinions, not opinions derived from corporate pay, are on your side, and support your decision. thank you
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Published and usable under reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms is a very common definition of an open standard. See most ISO standards. The requirement to be free to implement is a relatively new addition to the definition (within the last 10-15 years).
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I'm with others on this one... I don't think Google cares if it has to pay or not. Money is not exactly something Google has a shortage of.
They do, however, want to be able to freely make and distribute products to others that can, in turn, use them to make other products... without having to worry about their customers being sued into the ground, as is happening now.
Google wants Android to succeed, make no mistake. And "freely implementing" H.264 in Android does not allow their customers to freely USE Android without coughing up money for the rights. This is all about protecting Google's interests, not its bottom line.
Google thrives by providing free stuff to people that allows them to better understand them and thereby feeding them ads that meet their needs and wants. Having other companies sue the users of their products doesn't exactly help Google.
Remember to maintain your supply of
The standard is open, and there are open source encoders and decoders. So in that sense, it's open: Everything is fully and publicly documented. However, it is also covered by hundreds of patents, which means you can't actually use any of that information without getting a licence from the patent holders. One of whome is Microsoft, who stands to make a lot of money from it. Others include Sony and Apple, who stand to make a lot too. So far the consortium that administers the patent pool has been quite reasonable about terms - free for noncommercial use, low costs even for commercial - but there is a fear that if x264 were to become so established it were impossible to do without it then there would be a temptation for them to start milking more money from those patents.
While others focus on the definition of "open", I want to focus on the definitions of bright, long-winded and FUD. In defining these terms, I think you are a bit confused. You seem to be using the "bright" to imply having a reasonable amount of information or insight. After reading Mr. Bright's article, I learned a handful of things that I didn't know before, so I guess I would have to consider him at least a little bright. I imagine the rolling of your eyes while reading his article made you a bit dizzy, preventing you from having a similar experience. Or maybe you just know a lot more than I do.
When you define FUD, perhaps you mean that he has a different opinion than you. No matter which side of this argument a person is on, I think that it is easy to agree that this is going to make implementation of the video tag by web developers more difficult and less likely to happen in the next couple of years.
When you define long-winded, perhaps you mean "taking the time to build his position". Clearly from your submission, you are a man of few words. I can admire someone like you that doesn't let information get in the way of expression. I can only wish that life was that easy for me. I keep getting bogged down in considering positions other than my own.
One thing I can say that Mr. Bright has on you though... he was willing to put his name on his position. For all the effort you put into adding your own brand of color to your submission, I just can't understand why you wouldn't want to take full credit.
WebM and Chrome are both open sourced under public licenses. To say Google "owns" them is to not understand how these open licenses work. Also, the patents behind VP8 have been released, irrevocably, to the public.
Remember to maintain your supply of
Although very crudely worded, "Anonymous Coward" is right. H.264 is created to make money.
Chrome was created to make money.
Don't forget that when evaluating Google's stance on this.
If Microsoft only supports H.264 and Google/Mozilla/Opera only supports WebM, the winner is - beyond a shadow of a doubt - Adobe and flash. There's no need for Microsoft to play nice, the video tag is not established and they can in practice delay it indefinitely.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Why should I pay 10 cents for something to be included that I don't need because I have a free alternative?
Hell, let's just replace all the tens of thousands of free packages in our Linux repos with patented apps that each have a _completely_ insignifigant ten cent fee?
Or we could stop the bullshit right now and not support software patents that lead to a system closed from competition.
The problem is that H.264's license structure is based around traditional producer-consumer relationships, which is not compatible with the concept behind free software. Royalty payments are inherently incompatible with the free software model, because it prevents people from liberally copying and sharing software. Note that royalties are the problem; other payment models are perfectly fine (I can, for example, charge you money for copies of Debian -- prior to widely available broadband connections, this sort of thing was not so uncommon).
Palm trees and 8
cut bullshit. a standard that is not open, and subject to licensing fees, is NOT open. you cant redefine open.
Well then perhaps you should stop trying to do so. Open means documented and interoperable, it does not mean patent-unencumbered. It means you can see what is happening and make changes, but it doesn't guarantee you the right to redistribute those changes, which is why we need a distinction between Open and Free software and why the OSI is the enemy of Free Software; it attempts to conflate the two by redefinition of the term "Open" to mean something almost-but-not-actually like Free Software and dilutes it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That is simply trading one set of restrictions for another.
The tradeoff is that supporting Software Freedom will lead to more freedom for you eventually, while supporting closed solutions leads to more lack of freedom in the future. You have to create the world you want to live in.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is simply false. (Lifted from a post I just made about this in the Ars forums) MPEG-LA licenses the H.264 standards under RAND (reasonable and non-discriminitory) terms -- they're not playing favorites to give some companies strategic advantage over others. Moreover, if you think about the fact that there are 1000 patents in the H.264 license pool, and no individual company owns more than a few, you quickly realize that nobody who actually implements H.264 is making more money from it than they pay for it. The idea that anyone is supporting H.264 because they want to get rich off of license fees is ludicrous.
H.264 is a real standard, developed and governed by a multi-party process, recognized by international standards organizations, and extensively documented. WebM is some C code that Google bought and dumped on the public. Other stakeholders had no input into the "specification". There is no formal multi-party governance process; the format is de facto controlled by Google, because they employ the developers. In practice, WebM is defined by Google's code, not by standards documents.
Oh, and WebM is also technically inferior.
And as if that weren't enough, it's extremely unclear, given what happened to Microsoft with VC-1, that WebM has actually managed to avoid patent liability. Keep in mind, Google hasn't indemnified anyone, and their strategic interests are served here even if a patent licensing pool does eventually need to be set up for WebM. So they have essentially nothing to lose by pretending its unencumbered, even if it's not.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
This is what the outcome will be - arguments for removing support for H.264 fall flat since Google knows this is what will eventually happen (especially now that Chrome has become much more popular). The end result will be that fewer web sites will be iOS-compatible thereby strengthening Android, since it does support Flash. This is Google playing corporate BS games using "openness" as a guise, plain and simple... Guess they took some lessons from Apple.
H.264 is a standard; not a de-facto, or "industry" standard, but one adopted by an international standards body with wide representation. It publishes specs. If you build a part to do something with H.264 video, as long as it conforms to spec, it will work with others' products.
... ?? Your point is? I believe what you're referring to is a documented format. Any such documented audio/video encoding format that conforms to its specification can be read by any video decoder that conforms to the same respective spec.
In fact: Data from any type of encoder conforming to a spec can be read it's corresponding decoder! ( GnuZip reads WinZipped files... )
This means, Theora, VP8, MP4, MP3, and even Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Win Media Audio (WMV) have multiple implementations -- they are all "open standards" in that anyone can create a complying implementation via the format's documentation.
You know, like the way any unlocked GSM phone works on any GSM network that operates on the same frequency band. [H.264 is] ideal for startups, because you only need expertise in your own narrow product field, not in the entire much broader space.
The same can be said for VP8, Windows Media, MP3, Theora, Vorbis, and virtually every existing codec known to man.
The difference is that unlike H.264 "standards boards", VP8 and Theora do not pursue license fees, and claim no patents.
Startups would be more wise to go with a codec that is not patent encumbered, and costs $0.00 to license... Not H.264.
To build say an innovative silicon decoder you don't need to know how to build an encoder, [blah blah blah blah blah blah]
Documented file formats enable multiple or partial implementations of codecs... Self evident really, no need to iterate every type of implementation that can exist or re-repeat yourself, we get it.
And while you occasionally run into interop issues this is positively nothing compared to the alternative of having inhouse expertise for *everything*.
Yes, it's quite foolish to build an inhouse codec, but H.264 isn't the only codec out there.
Hell, you can create a wrapper that allows an interface to external codec libraries in order to support all of the codecs I've mentioned above... However, if you ship a product with a patented encumbered codec, you must pay the licensing fee to MS, MPEG-LA, or other such patent holders.
The license fee for VP8, and Vorbis is $0.00.
Compared to other costs, licensing fees are fairly trivial. $100k doesn't even buy a competent engineer for a year.
Yep, and for absolutely NO FEE you can just use Theora/Vorbis, or VP8. $100k is 10000000% more than $1, and infinity% more than $0.
Fact is, Chrome is a derivative of Chromium -- If Google goes with H.264 then Chormium would have to have H.264 support, or else Google has to maintain a separate video branch in Chrome.
Unfortunately, If I compile Chromium Source Code that has H.264 support I'm forbidden from distributing the binaries unless I pay the licensing fees.
From a web browser "start-up" perspective, it's best for Google NOT to burden the "start-up" with licensing fees or maintaining it's own incompatible video branch if the "start-up" were to fork Chromium.
Thus, Chromium currently has no H.264 support (in favor of VP8 and Theora/Vorbis), and Chrome is simply adopting the same behavior as upstream.
Additionally: I could have just s/ H.264 / WMV / in your post, and made the reductio ad absurdum argument for Microsoft's proprietary format -- but my heart wouldn't be in it.
You're completely missing the point.
Nobody cares about a single codec. Someone makes a good proprietary codec ? Good for them !
The problem arises when it becomes a required base part of the web.
Remember the GIF debacle ? Remember that many open source image editor did not have the capability to save gif images ? That's exactly what is at stake here.
Have one company control a base standard of the web makes it control who can or cannot create the tools to create web content. Of course big players like Google or Mozilla have the funds to pay royalties, but what about that guy who made a simple command line tool to split/merge h264 videos ?
You can argue that the MPEG-LA has made the codec royalty free but truth is they can instantly make it illegal to open source any software using h264.
That's what the fuss is all about, not just throwing two bucks at a video codec.
H.264's licensing terms are anything but "reasonable", given its context. HTTP is free, HTML is free, FTP is free, every single protocol and format standardized for its use on online communication has been free since the inception of the Internet, demanding now the use of a codec that requires monetary payment to create, distribute and display content using it is outrageous, particularly when valid, Free alternatives exist and have already begun to be put in place.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.