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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!
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.
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
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
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
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.'"
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.
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