Mozilla To Support H.264

suraj.sun writes with a followup to last week's news that Mozilla was thinking about reversing their stance on H.264 support. Mozilla chairman Mitchell Baker and CTO Brendan Eich have now both written blog posts explaining why they feel H.264 support is no longer optional. Eich wrote, "We will not require anyone to pay for Firefox. We will not burden our downstream source redistributors with royalty fees. We may have to continue to fall back on Flash on some desktop OSes. I’ll write more when I know more about desktop H.264, specifically on Windows XP. What I do know for certain is this: H.264 is absolutely required right now to compete on mobile. I do not believe that we can reject H.264 content in Firefox on Android or in B2G and survive the shift to mobile. Losing a battle is a bitter experience. I won’t sugar-coat this pill. But we must swallow it if we are to succeed in our mobile initiatives. Failure on mobile is too likely to consign Mozilla to decline and irrelevance." Baker added, "Our first approach at bringing open codecs to the Web has ended up at an impasse on mobile, but we’re not done yet. ... We'll find a way around this impasse."

Comments

Re:Will Googorola sue them?

[hairyfeet]

Nope because after all Google is free but they are still paying their $699 license fee. Can I say "told ya so" now? because i did, i told you so over and over that this is EXACTLY what would happen. All the FOSS zealots with their perception bubbles were 'Yay flash is dead!" and I said 'hey dumbass, you are cheering the death of a company that NEVER bitched if you redistributed, and even let you come up with a knockoff! And finally guess who was paying that $699 license fee for you? that would be Adobe".

But you reap what you sow and you WILL pay what you owe, you cheered the death of flash and then sat on your collective asses as it got replaced by the new SCO who will make sure all those cock smoking teabaggers pay their $699 license fee. In fact now that SCO is defunct I propose the $699 fee meme be officially assigned to MPEG-LA, who will slap you with a lawsuit if you don't pay your fee even faster than Mcbride would have.

The sad part is this COULD have been different, you COULD have stood up as developers and refused to support the iShiny unless it got support for Theora or WebM and refused to have anything to do with HTML V5 until it had a FOSS codec as minimum supported....but you didn't. You sold out, you went for the iShiny with dreams of appstores and iMoney. Well judas you made your bed, hope you find it comfy. Who's laughing now? Oh right, that would be Apple, Google, and MSFT. Final prediction Android locked with code signing or eFuses in less than 2 years, because H.265 will have DRM and it'll be a DMCA violation to support it without protected path. Google knew this, why do you think they've been treating GPL V3 as the black death, never to touch Android?

Game, set, and match FOSS. Now you either change your license so you can charge, take a hell of a hit to pay the $699 license fee for ALL of those downstream, or get locked out the web, your choice. But don't say i didn't tell ya so, because i most certainly did.