Because they're professional game developers and they've worked with both closed and open drivers. The Intel Linux GPU driver team spent time working with Valve's Linux team in Bellvue. The Valve guys told the Intel guys that they like open source drivers better. You should read the blog post I linked to.
Why would Valve care if the drivers are Open Source?
Because they find them easier to work with. To quote a recent blog post by one of Intel's open source GPU driver developers: "The funny thing is Valve guys say the same thing about drivers. There were a couple times where we felt like they were trying to convince us that open source drivers are a good idea. We had to remind them that they were preaching to the choir.:) Their problem with closed drivers (on all platforms) is that it's such a blackbox that they have to play guess-and-check games. There's no way for them to know how changing a particular setting will affect the performance. If performance gets worse, they have no way to know why. If they can see where time is going in the driver, they can make much more educated guesses."
My favourite example is the HTML 5 Angry Birds game.
Angry Birds Chrome is a poor example of an HTML5 game as it relies on Flash for audio. If I try it with Firefox 14.0.1, for example, without Flash installed I get a message which tells me that I either need to install Flash or use Chrome as it has Flash built-in. Better examples of HTML5 games which work without Flash are Cut the Rope, Pirates Love Daisies, World's Biggest Pac-Man, and Word Squared.
The development of the first three games was funded by Microsoft to demonstrate that credible applications can in fact be built against an HTML5 runtime. They also demonstrate that there are already high quality applications available for Firefox OS. It's pretty trivial to make them installable on Firefox OS.
From what I understand they're banking on the fact that writing an app for Firefox OS will use the same technologies as making a webpage, which should make it viable for a huge developer community.
Yes, especially because that developer community already exists. Even Microsoft has already inadvertently funded the development of a few Firefox OS applications. The HTML5 version of Cut the Rope, for example, already runs on Firefox OS. To make it an installable Firefox OS application all that would need to be added is a manifest file and an install page. And similarly for other Microsoft funded HTML5 games like Pirates Love Daisies and World's Biggest Pacman.
Something more for Thunderbird is integrated instant messaging. I want unified email and instant messaging in one application so I'll have unified contacts and search. The number of instant messaging services supported by Thunderbird seems like it will be limited at first but that will improve with time and perhaps there will be add-ons available to support more services.
I see no evidence that it isn't true. Browsers are more capable and faster today than they were even two years. Every browser maker wants their browser to be the fastest and the benchmark is the speed of other browsers. Competition breeds improvement.
And indeed there are plenty of other browsers on the platform.
There are no other browsers on iOS. There are only shadows of other browsers. If you can't have your full browser stack on iOS, there are no competiting browsers.
It's only the rendering engine that's mandated to be one defacto-standard. And that's for user experience reasons.
*Only* the rendering engine? You mean the most fundamental part of any browser? In any case, it's both the JavaScript engine and the rendering engine that are banned. My user experience would be improved by being able to run full Firefox on iOS. I like Firefox. I can run Firefox on Windows. I can run Firefox on OS X. I can run Firefox on Linux. I can run Firefox on Android. There is no justification for not being able to run Firefox on iOS. The quality of the user's experience is for the user to decide, not Apple.
People are not all the same. Neither are corporations.
If you want to draw an analogy between people and corporations, corporations are psychopaths. This may help you: http://www.economist.com/node/2647328
For sure Apple won't be allowing any other browser engine on iOS. Because there is no benefit to the consumer in doing so.
There are clear benefits for the end user that are derived from browser competition. You need only look at the improvement in browsers on the desktop to see that.
Apple won't allow other browser engines on iOS because it introduces competition on the platform and has the potential to diminish Apple's opportunity for profit. The capability to run web-based applications on iOS in a full version of Firefox or Opera or Chrome horrifies Apple because it would mean iOS users could install applications through distribution channels other than the one Apple controls and profits from. It also means that a user of Firefox or Opera or Chrome can more easily move to another platform because they can just go ahead and keep using Firefox or Opera or Chrome on the new platform with a minimum of fuss.
Remember: corporations hate competition. They will always do everything they can to avoid it.
The fact that doing so allows them to make dump trucks full of money out of the defacto walled garden is incidental.
This is naive. Generating profit and increasing shareholder value are Apple's primary concerns, as they are with any large corporation. It is not incidental. It is an explicit goal and everything Apple does is designed to achieve that goal.
If CSIRO is a patent troll then so is every major university. Stanford University's Office of Technology Licensing, for example, exists to generate income through the licencing of Stanford developed technologies which they then invest back into research and education. CSIRO similarly invests its income back into research and the Science and Industry Endowment Fund. The idea that research organisations are patent trolls and shouldn't be allowed to licence their inventions to others in order to maintain their focus on research is both farcical and intellectually bankrupt. Joe Mullin's jingoistic and, frankly, pathetically insular article isn't worth a second reading.
Visual Studio is hardly the only development IDE on Windows. Yes, it is good, but you cannot really say that "free desktop software development dead in Windows 8" just because gasp, MS wants you to buy the new version.
I agree. Ars Technica used an inflammatory title to drive traffic to their site. I used to like Ars but it has adopted a tabloid journalism flavour lately so I don't read it anymore. For me, Ars is a damaged brand.
Google acquired WebM only a couple of years ago and specs for it were released then. It takes YEARS before it'll start to come out.with hardware decoders. (I remember dealing with h.264 encoded files back in what, 2004? When practically nothing played it, and DivX was the popular codec of the day). WebM in hardware will probably start happening around 2013-2014 at the earliest (as in - you can buy devices with webm support).
This company did not raise prices for their older MPEG1, MPEG2, or MP3 standards, so why do you think they'll suddenly turn evil?
The MPEG LA has quite often raised the price for H.264. The MPEG LA's H.264 license summary talks about past license increases. The royalty cap has increased since 2005:
The maximum annual royalty (“cap”) for an Enterprise (commonly controlled Legal Entities) is $3.5 million per year 2005-2006, $4.25 million per year 2007-08, $5 million per year 2009-10, and $6.5 million per year in 2011-15.
The MPEG LA's H.264 license FAQ specifically addresses their approach to increasing license costs:
Q: Is there a limitation on the amount that royalty rates may increase at each renewal?
A: If royalty rates were to increase, they will not increase by more than 10% at each renewal for specific license grants.*
*Annual Royalty Caps are not subject to the 10% limitation
H.264 is not free-as-in-freedom nor free-as-in-beer, and patents are the reason. IP amounts to copyright, trade secrets and patents, but the first two don't apply here. It's a patent issue.
No. It's a licencing issue. H.264 is not an open, royalty-free standard and that's what makes it bad choice for the web. VP8 is covered by patents but it's licenced under royalty-free terms. If H.264 was licenced under royalty-free terms for all use cases then there would be no issue.
Phoronix never confirms anything. Phoronix makes shit up, or possibly, at best, speculates.
You should probably read the article. Michael Larabel went to Valve's offices in Bellevue, Washington and spoke to Gabe Newell among others. It isn't a question of confirmation. In this instance you're essentially claiming that either Michael Larabel is lying, or Gabe Newell and others at Valve are lying, or both. Do you have evidence of that or are you, at best, speculating?
The story? Well, it's a story, anyhow. The tone the article takes is unfortunate. All the "us and them" in the article takes away from the few interesting things it mentions.
Mozilla forbids Add-on writers from putting it more than 2 major version numbers ahead. This policy worked fine when 2 major version numbers took years... but right now, that's 12 weeks.
In what sense is Chrome lightweight? Of the five major browsers, Chrome is the second biggest memory consumer and it comes bundled with Flash, which I personally don't have a use for.
"VP7 is used for versions prior to Skype 5.5. As of version 5.7 VP8 is used for both group and one on one standard definition video chat and H264 is used for 720p and 1080p high definition group and one on one video chat."
That's in the context of a particular piece of hardware which happens to produce an H.264 stream. The Skype blog post cited by Wikipedia doesn't say anything about H.264 being used preferentially for full high definition video calls and doesn't imply that a web cam which produces a full high definition VP8 stream wouldn't be supported. You're reading too much into it.
And finally some, like Skype are simply legacy users that were using this codec before it was open sourced (V7 in this case) and have since actually partially moved away from it (h.264 for HD chat).
Rather than moving away from it, Skype has been adding support for VP8 over the last year:
If H.264 Baseline is not offered under a royalty-free licence before the 15th of March 2012, then VP8 will be the required video codec for WebRTC. See the the Video Codec Requirements section of the WebRTC IETF draft: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-cbran-rtcweb-codec-01. This is why semiconductor companies are keen to promote their WebM support:
Of course, it's unlikely that H.264 Baseline will be royalty-free before the 15th so VP8 will likely be the required video codec. Still, it could happen and if it does then everyone can implement support for H.264 Baseline in their browsers without issue.
So to on each side then.. And guess what; Microsoft don't support h264 in IE, they just support plugins.
Internet Explorer 9 supports two, and only two, codecs in the HTML5 video element. IE9 supports H.264 and it supports WebM if the codec has been installed. No other codecs are supported, not even, for example, Windows Media Video.
Perhaps it will be directly implemented in Skype or something.
Skype will use Opus in future. Opus is a low latency codec suitable for both speech and music coding built from the combination of the SILK and CELT codecs. Opus outperforms AAC (and maybe it outperforms Fraunhofer's AAC-ELD codec as well). I imagine Skype's use of Opus will be dependent on Microsoft deciding to stick with that plan. However, as Microsoft has been discovering recently that codecs which require royalty payments can be difficult to manage, I suppose they'll stick with the plan to use Opus as it's royalty-free.
Slashdot Mirror
How would they know?
Because they're professional game developers and they've worked with both closed and open drivers. The Intel Linux GPU driver team spent time working with Valve's Linux team in Bellvue. The Valve guys told the Intel guys that they like open source drivers better. You should read the blog post I linked to.
Why would Valve care if the drivers are Open Source?
Because they find them easier to work with. To quote a recent blog post by one of Intel's open source GPU driver developers: "The funny thing is Valve guys say the same thing about drivers. There were a couple times where we felt like they were trying to convince us that open source drivers are a good idea. We had to remind them that they were preaching to the choir. :) Their problem with closed drivers (on all platforms) is that it's such a blackbox that they have to play guess-and-check games. There's no way for them to know how changing a particular setting will affect the performance. If performance gets worse, they have no way to know why. If they can see where time is going in the driver, they can make much more educated guesses."
Good luck getting real open source drivers out of Nvidia, ATI/AMD, and Intel for their graphics hardware.
Intel develops open source drivers for their graphics hardware. See for yourself on their Intel Linux Graphics website. Intel worked with Valve recently to improve their drivers for Valve's games. Phoronix has some statistics on the development history of Intel's open source drivers.
My favourite example is the HTML 5 Angry Birds game.
Angry Birds Chrome is a poor example of an HTML5 game as it relies on Flash for audio. If I try it with Firefox 14.0.1, for example, without Flash installed I get a message which tells me that I either need to install Flash or use Chrome as it has Flash built-in. Better examples of HTML5 games which work without Flash are Cut the Rope, Pirates Love Daisies, World's Biggest Pac-Man, and Word Squared.
The development of the first three games was funded by Microsoft to demonstrate that credible applications can in fact be built against an HTML5 runtime. They also demonstrate that there are already high quality applications available for Firefox OS. It's pretty trivial to make them installable on Firefox OS.
From what I understand they're banking on the fact that writing an app for Firefox OS will use the same technologies as making a webpage, which should make it viable for a huge developer community.
Yes, especially because that developer community already exists. Even Microsoft has already inadvertently funded the development of a few Firefox OS applications. The HTML5 version of Cut the Rope, for example, already runs on Firefox OS. To make it an installable Firefox OS application all that would need to be added is a manifest file and an install page. And similarly for other Microsoft funded HTML5 games like Pirates Love Daisies and World's Biggest Pacman.
What more is there for email?
Something more for Thunderbird is integrated instant messaging. I want unified email and instant messaging in one application so I'll have unified contacts and search. The number of instant messaging services supported by Thunderbird seems like it will be limited at first but that will improve with time and perhaps there will be add-ons available to support more services.
I see no evidence that that is true.
I see no evidence that it isn't true. Browsers are more capable and faster today than they were even two years. Every browser maker wants their browser to be the fastest and the benchmark is the speed of other browsers. Competition breeds improvement.
And indeed there are plenty of other browsers on the platform.
There are no other browsers on iOS. There are only shadows of other browsers. If you can't have your full browser stack on iOS, there are no competiting browsers.
It's only the rendering engine that's mandated to be one defacto-standard. And that's for user experience reasons.
*Only* the rendering engine? You mean the most fundamental part of any browser? In any case, it's both the JavaScript engine and the rendering engine that are banned. My user experience would be improved by being able to run full Firefox on iOS. I like Firefox. I can run Firefox on Windows. I can run Firefox on OS X. I can run Firefox on Linux. I can run Firefox on Android. There is no justification for not being able to run Firefox on iOS. The quality of the user's experience is for the user to decide, not Apple.
People are not all the same. Neither are corporations.
If you want to draw an analogy between people and corporations, corporations are psychopaths. This may help you: http://www.economist.com/node/2647328
For sure Apple won't be allowing any other browser engine on iOS. Because there is no benefit to the consumer in doing so.
There are clear benefits for the end user that are derived from browser competition. You need only look at the improvement in browsers on the desktop to see that.
Apple won't allow other browser engines on iOS because it introduces competition on the platform and has the potential to diminish Apple's opportunity for profit. The capability to run web-based applications on iOS in a full version of Firefox or Opera or Chrome horrifies Apple because it would mean iOS users could install applications through distribution channels other than the one Apple controls and profits from. It also means that a user of Firefox or Opera or Chrome can more easily move to another platform because they can just go ahead and keep using Firefox or Opera or Chrome on the new platform with a minimum of fuss.
Remember: corporations hate competition. They will always do everything they can to avoid it.
The fact that doing so allows them to make dump trucks full of money out of the defacto walled garden is incidental.
This is naive. Generating profit and increasing shareholder value are Apple's primary concerns, as they are with any large corporation. It is not incidental. It is an explicit goal and everything Apple does is designed to achieve that goal.
If CSIRO is a patent troll then so is every major university. Stanford University's Office of Technology Licensing, for example, exists to generate income through the licencing of Stanford developed technologies which they then invest back into research and education. CSIRO similarly invests its income back into research and the Science and Industry Endowment Fund. The idea that research organisations are patent trolls and shouldn't be allowed to licence their inventions to others in order to maintain their focus on research is both farcical and intellectually bankrupt. Joe Mullin's jingoistic and, frankly, pathetically insular article isn't worth a second reading.
Visual Studio is hardly the only development IDE on Windows. Yes, it is good, but you cannot really say that "free desktop software development dead in Windows 8" just because gasp, MS wants you to buy the new version.
I agree. Ars Technica used an inflammatory title to drive traffic to their site. I used to like Ars but it has adopted a tabloid journalism flavour lately so I don't read it anymore. For me, Ars is a damaged brand.
Google acquired WebM only a couple of years ago and specs for it were released then. It takes YEARS before it'll start to come out.with hardware decoders. (I remember dealing with h.264 encoded files back in what, 2004? When practically nothing played it, and DivX was the popular codec of the day). WebM in hardware will probably start happening around 2013-2014 at the earliest (as in - you can buy devices with webm support).
I would say the years have passed and the hardware is coming out this year: http://blog.webmproject.org/2012/03/webm-gaining-momentum-in-hardware.html
This company did not raise prices for their older MPEG1, MPEG2, or MP3 standards, so why do you think they'll suddenly turn evil?
The MPEG LA has quite often raised the price for H.264. The MPEG LA's H.264 license summary talks about past license increases. The royalty cap has increased since 2005:
The maximum annual royalty (“cap”) for an Enterprise (commonly controlled Legal Entities) is $3.5 million per year 2005-2006, $4.25 million per year 2007-08, $5 million per year 2009-10, and $6.5 million per year in 2011-15.
The MPEG LA's H.264 license FAQ specifically addresses their approach to increasing license costs:
Q: Is there a limitation on the amount that royalty rates may increase at each renewal?
A: If royalty rates were to increase, they will not increase by more than 10% at each renewal for specific license grants.*
*Annual Royalty Caps are not subject to the 10% limitation
H.264 is not free-as-in-freedom nor free-as-in-beer, and patents are the reason. IP amounts to copyright, trade secrets and patents, but the first two don't apply here. It's a patent issue.
No. It's a licencing issue. H.264 is not an open, royalty-free standard and that's what makes it bad choice for the web. VP8 is covered by patents but it's licenced under royalty-free terms. If H.264 was licenced under royalty-free terms for all use cases then there would be no issue.
Phoronix never confirms anything. Phoronix makes shit up, or possibly, at best, speculates.
You should probably read the article. Michael Larabel went to Valve's offices in Bellevue, Washington and spoke to Gabe Newell among others. It isn't a question of confirmation. In this instance you're essentially claiming that either Michael Larabel is lying, or Gabe Newell and others at Valve are lying, or both. Do you have evidence of that or are you, at best, speculating?
from the let-the-dingos-eat-her dept.
The plural of dingo is dingoes, not dingos.
The story? Well, it's a story, anyhow. The tone the article takes is unfortunate. All the "us and them" in the article takes away from the few interesting things it mentions.
Mozilla forbids Add-on writers from putting it more than 2 major version numbers ahead. This policy worked fine when 2 major version numbers took years... but right now, that's 12 weeks.
Add-ons default to compatible since Firefox 10. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Add-ons/Add-ons_Default_to_Compatible and http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2012/01/05/default-compatibility-is-coming-and-your-help-is-needed/.
Because it's lightweight
In what sense is Chrome lightweight? Of the five major browsers, Chrome is the second biggest memory consumer and it comes bundled with Flash, which I personally don't have a use for.
"VP7 is used for versions prior to Skype 5.5. As of version 5.7 VP8 is used for both group and one on one standard definition video chat and H264 is used for 720p and 1080p high definition group and one on one video chat."
That's in the context of a particular piece of hardware which happens to produce an H.264 stream. The Skype blog post cited by Wikipedia doesn't say anything about H.264 being used preferentially for full high definition video calls and doesn't imply that a web cam which produces a full high definition VP8 stream wouldn't be supported. You're reading too much into it.
And finally some, like Skype are simply legacy users that were using this codec before it was open sourced (V7 in this case) and have since actually partially moved away from it (h.264 for HD chat).
Rather than moving away from it, Skype has been adding support for VP8 over the last year:
http://gigaom.com/video/skype-vp8-video-conferencing/
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/08/one-to-one-vp8-video-calling-now.html
If H.264 Baseline is not offered under a royalty-free licence before the 15th of March 2012, then VP8 will be the required video codec for WebRTC. See the the Video Codec Requirements section of the WebRTC IETF draft: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-cbran-rtcweb-codec-01. This is why semiconductor companies are keen to promote their WebM support:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/verisilicon-releases-new-generation-of-hantro-video-ip-products-to-promote-webm-and-webrtc-2012-02-22
Of course, it's unlikely that H.264 Baseline will be royalty-free before the 15th so VP8 will likely be the required video codec. Still, it could happen and if it does then everyone can implement support for H.264 Baseline in their browsers without issue.
Now that Mozilla has decided to have Firefox look and behave almost exactly like Chrome, but without being as fast or memory-efficient as Chrome
This is correct. Firefox isn't as memory-efficient as Chrome. In fact, Firefox is more memory efficient than Chrome: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129-14.html
So to on each side then.. And guess what; Microsoft don't support h264 in IE, they just support plugins.
Internet Explorer 9 supports two, and only two, codecs in the HTML5 video element. IE9 supports H.264 and it supports WebM if the codec has been installed. No other codecs are supported, not even, for example, Windows Media Video.
Perhaps it will be directly implemented in Skype or something.
Skype will use Opus in future. Opus is a low latency codec suitable for both speech and music coding built from the combination of the SILK and CELT codecs. Opus outperforms AAC (and maybe it outperforms Fraunhofer's AAC-ELD codec as well). I imagine Skype's use of Opus will be dependent on Microsoft deciding to stick with that plan. However, as Microsoft has been discovering recently that codecs which require royalty payments can be difficult to manage, I suppose they'll stick with the plan to use Opus as it's royalty-free.
Ambrose Bierce said it best: "Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."