Corporations rarely hold the broad scope of powers that governments do. Parents ditto. (Consumers can choose to not buy from a corporation they dislike; children can typically run away from abusive parents and seek refuge with neighbours and family. Seekign refuge from government is another matter entirely as history will show you.)
Really? which part of history is that, exactly? I can't remember any totalitarian regime that didn't have hordes of people inmigrating to neighboring countries. Sure in the worst ones many people were caught, usually when they tried to hide in the same country instead of getting out, but children trying to find refuge from their abusive parents within their own home usually fare no better.
As for corporations, I've only got four words for you: modern day United States.
See the history of MPEG2, WMV, Quicktime and RealMedia if you want to know more. Are you new to the internet or what?
I call BS on the "most generic video players only support DivX." Zunes, Archos players, and even WD set-top boxes, PS3s, XBoxes all play h264. Maybe you have some old tech that doesn't support it, but it's not as though it's an iPod-only format.
If your concept of a "generic video player" is the Microsoft Zune, you're obviously too out-of-touch with reality to comment. Do you also believe when we speak of a 'generic PC', we mean a Sony Vaio? and yes, all the generic, no-name chinese-made video players only support DivX, which is what most people outside the US own and use.
Again: ??? Are you trolling? Who's talking about forcing anyone to buy anything to enter high school? And anyway, MP3 *is* a standard, and for years it was *the* de facto standard for audio. What format are you using for your portable player?
It was the closest analogy I could think of. Regardless, MP3 is *NOT* an official standard, it's merely commonplace enough to be a de-facto one, and it'd be nice if you could appreciate the difference between those two concepts. The fact that most people are happy with committing blantant patent infringement is no reason to declare a patented format an official standard for the entirety of the web.
Citation needed. And don't give me stats like, "X people own DVD players, and lots of DVD players have DivX support." Yeah, lots of players have DivX support, but how many people are burning DivX movies to DVD for that purpose? And if you can come up with that stat, tell me how many of them are pirates anyway, and why they don't use a more sensible method for watching movies.
"Sensible"? what the fuck are you talking about? and honestly, if you're asking me for 'citations' I'd like to see yours as well, as (by your definition) it'd be irrelevant if a million people own h.264-capable devices if only a hundred use them to play h.264 content. Because if support is the only metric, then the fact that a non-zero percentage of DVD players supports DivX and zero of them support h.264 is enough proof, even ignoring the aforementioned fact of generic video players only supporting the former.
You'd have to be actively trying to do it worse than Flash already does. If the HTML5 standard wasn't such a blantant attempt by Apple to undermine Firefox and Opera I'd support it for the same reasons that the GP does, Flash's security record makes IE look like freaking Fort Knox.
Why not just kick H264 over to a media player (VLC/Quicktime/WMP) instead of trying to include codecs in browsers? That's an option, at least, since most media players will decode h264.
We tried that before, and it sucked so much we welcomed flash with open arms afterwards.
When you stop and think about it, it doesn't really make a ton of sense. Flash has worked as a stop-gap measure, but it really has never been a good way to handle things.
It does make sense. Thanks to Adobe's huge marketing power, regular users think of installing flash as an everyday thing, while asking them to install a video plugin still gives them Quicktime-induced nightmares of the 'dark ages' of the internet.
H264 is getting to be pretty darned ubiquitous, close to how MP3 was for audio back in the heyday of Napster.
No, it isn't. No DVD player supports it, and Blu-Ray players are far too expensive to be commonplace. Most generic video players only support DivX as well, and contrary to the average Slashdotter's opinion iPods are anything but 'ubiquitous' in that large area we call 'the rest of the world that's not the US'.
Also, technically you're supposed to pay a patent licensing fee for distributing MP3 encoders, MP3 decoders, and even MP3 files, so it really isn't that different.
Which is why we've never based an actual standard on it. Most people also pirate Photoshop, but that doesn't mean we're gonna pass a law requiring a copy of it to enter high-school, are we?
So who doesn't use H264 to encode their movies? In my experience, it's mostly (a) people who use Ogg for ideological reasons rather than practical reasons; and (b) pirates who are under the mistaken impression that the old DivX encoder provides better compression than H264, or believe that H264 is a proprietary Apple format.
And (c) people who are aware that DivX has far, *FAR* better penetration rates than h.264 and find the difference in size negligible compared to it. You may dismiss anything that doesn't support your favorite format as "legacy", but most of the world isn't in a rush to pay $300 for a new standalone player and another $300 for the latest iPod, so if being commonplace was your argument for h.264 you should be backing up DivX instead.
Just like Microsoft is going bankrupt trying to fight Apple on the desktop front, right? ohh, wait.
Different hardware doesn't imply incompatible software. Chances are all 50 of those will be running Android, and therefore not only will they be compatible among themselves, but with the myriad of phones (by myriad of different manufacturers) too.
Except its interface is the same worldwide, yet there's a disproportionately high number of iPod owners in the US compared to the rest of the world.
Sorry, but the 'interface' argument just stinks of self-justification. If other players' interfaces were so poor, don't you think the entire world would've swiched over? or at least, in countries whose economies could hardly afford iPods, have significantly lower penetration rates of MP3 players? yet neither is the case, people in South America own just as many MP3 players as people up north, except it's $30 generic pendrive-with-a-screen chinese manufactured MP3 players instead of shiny, Apple-sanctioned $300 iPods
Or maybe we're just smarter than you, and therefore able to learn complex and daunting interface paradigms such as 'press the Play button to play' without Apple simplifying it for us.
A better example, I think, would be education. Living without cars is fairly easy overall (except in the US, you people are truly backwards when it comes to designing cities), but there's almost no way to achieve a good standard of living without education in today's age and the same can be said for the Internet.
Firefox holds about 1/4 of the web browser market, and Opera is IIRC still the #1 mobile browser and Apple has shown great interest in capturing both markets in the past, so yes, they do have much to gain from increasing the barrier of entry to the market generally, and hurting Mozilla and Opera specifically.
But they shouldn't have to, that's the thing. Microsoft and Intel have already gotten in trouble for offering similar deals to OEMs to favor their products (the latter also in detriment of AMD), so it's not unconceivable that NVidia could be hit with a similar problem as well, as they also hold a significant share of the market in question and this could very well be interpreted as a move designed to keep a hold of it by unfair means.
If something is done with an HTML 5 video tag, it will(outside of nests of Free software idealists) almost certainly be h264.
You think? just like people only posted MPEG2 videos back in the days before Flash? no, what will happen is that everything will almost certainly be h.264, until there's a better codec out there (let's call it h.265) at which point half the content will be in h.264 and half in h.265, then large companies will smell the blood and jump in with their own, improved formats (let's call them WMV2) and lobby large content providers to use it, until browser makers start seeing h.264 as 'legacy' by being so incredibly inefficient compared to h.265 and WMV2 and drop support for it (it's not specified in the standard, remember?) and before you know it, we're in the exact same situation we had before Flash and all you've gained is that the propietary crap is wrapped in a 'video' tag rather than an 'object' one, for all the good that does to you.
No, the only solution is to specify *one* baseline codec that must be supported to comply with the standard, but leave web devs able to specify their own alternative if they so desire. That was what was going to happen with Theora as the baseline but devs able to specify h.264 or whatever shiny toy came later, until Apple began to pout and cry and refuse to implement Theora no matter what, leading us to the current situation.
Well, I think backwards compatibility is best dealt in the browser itself (as Microsoft did with IE8's compatiblity mode) rather than on the standard, specially if it can result in the simplification of the latter both to people implementing it and those creating content for it, as seemed the case with XHTML2.
Big guns? who, Chrome with its tiny marketshare and Safari with its even tinier one? the "big guns" of the browser market are either Microsoft and Mozilla, or just Microsoft depending on where do you draw the line, but only through massive levels of delusion could you arrive at the conclusion that Apple and Google are 'big guns' and Mozilla is merely a 'fringe' player.
It's funny and sad at the same time, when Microsoft's "we won't support anything" stance is actually likeable compared to what Apple is doing. They won't support what was originally meant to be the official standard, but at least they aren't trying to replace it with patented technology of their own. Though sadder still is when Adobe, bloated and corrupt Adobe, offers a more compelling alternative than either.
To be fair, many of the older C/C++ generation can't write their own algorithms either, for them the idea of an algorithm is "trick to make the computer do something faster" (bitwise operators and pointer arithmetic are a perennial favorite) rather than "redesign of the solution to reduce the work needed". They make a faster and more efficient Bubble Sort instead of just replacing it with a Quick Sort, to put it some way. And the older FORTRAN/COBOL guys are even worse in that respect.
If anything, Java and C# encourage programmers to learn proper algorithms by letting them focus on the core ideas and grand design rather than crude, line-by-line optimizations. Of course, Python, Ruby and Lua are even better, and pseudo-code with a human corrector is the ideal for that, but I take what I can get.
So yeah, I think all these elitism is just a big pile of horseshit. Sturgeon's Law applies to everything and everyone, of this generation and otherwise.
Err, no, not really. Rewriting simple code is easy, so it's usually done *while* writing the program, there's no need to wait until you're done to do it.
The really problematic part is changing the entire design which is why it's seldom done and, therefore, what always gets "patched" instead of remade when requirements change and deadlines tighten, making it where most of the "cruft" lies. And to properly redesign a program you *have* to do it from the ground up, trying to avoid that invariably leads to nothing but another patch thrown on top of the old ones, with all the problems that entails.
Yes they do, it's the text itself. What distinguishes it from the end product is the formatting, type-setting and other niceties added for publishing, to which the publisher also owns the rights to, or at least a license as they'd be otherwise liable for infringement as well.
The "source code" for a book would be the author's imagination and creative ability. The publishing company most certainly doesn't own *that* after they buy the rights to a particular book.
Neither does a company with respect to the programmer's imagination and creative ability either.
In the software world, if I buy the rights to a program I'm buying the end result of a particular combination of code. I don't get the rights to the individual modules/libraries inside that code.
Yes, you do. You seem to be confusing "licensing" with "buying rights", however, which is the difference between buying tickets for a football match and buying the stadium outright.
Because its been the standard in consoles for far too long. Back in the days of the original NES, older C64 and Atari players *did* deride it for the same reasons, but eventually the fact that Nintendo marketed almost exclusively to children made it easier to dismiss it as a mere 'toy' instead of a real, useful machine, and their success drowned what little criticism remained. In contrast, WinMo and JavaME developers haven't even been pushed out of the market yet let alone been gone long enough to be forgotten, so obviously the criticism will be much louder.
Furthermore, I don't give a shit about whether it's their right or not to do so. I only care that *I* don't like it and it is my right to voice my displeasure with it.
But Flash still uses H.264 too. I don't see too many people, either normal web users, webmasters or those making Flash applets complaining.
That's because Adobe is the one footing the bill for MPEG's patent licenses. If it were *them*, the actual users and webmasters, the bitchfest would be simply epic (well, mostly from webmasters, users would just torrent a pirated version from TPB or something).
And if anything is "fundamentalist" in this discussion, is the idea that performance trumps everything else, regardless of circumstances. You'd think all those arguing for h.264 due to its performance would be using IBM mainframes to post on Slashdot instead of going the el-cheapo route and assembling a regular "PC", given how little regard they give to the patent royalties that's been announced already, and the plethora of practical concerns that raises. Or, most likely, they're just planning on using a pirated encoder and try to get away with it by being a small player.
The same was said of HTML itself when Microsoft decided to 'fork' it with IE. Sure it took a long time for the dust to settle and Microsoft to accept defeat and finally implement the actual standard, but if we even took on Microsoft itself I doubt we'd fare any worse against the much smaller Google and Apple.
Just keep patents off the official standard. Sooner or later they'll learn the idiocy of patented standards, and its best we don't have to fork it over when they do, specially given the W3C is now the only standards body with any sort of credibility whatsoever.
The patent-free, open source and free are very rarely any good selling points.
Really? guess somebody should tell game devs that, then, and make them pony up the cash for AAC instead of using Ogg Vorbis for their engines.
When you want to ensure your product reaches the biggest amount of people, the best thing to do is to pick a patent and royalty-free standard as the base, and *then* work around the technical details, because nothing alienates hobbyists more than a third-party going around suing your customers for unpaid royalties. For a game engine such things are important, but for a web standard as is the case here, it's vital.
Polished art, story and music Battle for Wesnoth, and to top it off it's the best turn-based tactical game ever (HoMM? bleh. KB? good, but Wesnoth is better).
But there are huge problems towards developing story-based open source games, which Wesnoth averts mostly by making it extremely easy for a single man to create a campaign of his own: single-player games you usually play once, twice at most. Hard to keep interested in improving a game when you've already played through it a dozen times, and you know you'll have to play it a dozen more just to test the changes you're making.
And that's, also, why there's such a plethora of great multiplayer F/OSS games out there. Warsow in particular not only looks gorgeous, it's also the best arena shooter since UT2004 in terms of gameplay and that's because, when the devs improve the game, they improve it for *them* as well, not just for everybody else.
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Corporations rarely hold the broad scope of powers that governments do. Parents ditto. (Consumers can choose to not buy from a corporation they dislike; children can typically run away from abusive parents and seek refuge with neighbours and family. Seekign refuge from government is another matter entirely as history will show you.)
Really? which part of history is that, exactly? I can't remember any totalitarian regime that didn't have hordes of people inmigrating to neighboring countries. Sure in the worst ones many people were caught, usually when they tried to hide in the same country instead of getting out, but children trying to find refuge from their abusive parents within their own home usually fare no better.
As for corporations, I've only got four words for you: modern day United States.
*EVERYTHING* might be submarine patented.
???
See the history of MPEG2, WMV, Quicktime and RealMedia if you want to know more. Are you new to the internet or what?
I call BS on the "most generic video players only support DivX." Zunes, Archos players, and even WD set-top boxes, PS3s, XBoxes all play h264. Maybe you have some old tech that doesn't support it, but it's not as though it's an iPod-only format.
If your concept of a "generic video player" is the Microsoft Zune, you're obviously too out-of-touch with reality to comment. Do you also believe when we speak of a 'generic PC', we mean a Sony Vaio? and yes, all the generic, no-name chinese-made video players only support DivX, which is what most people outside the US own and use.
Again: ??? Are you trolling? Who's talking about forcing anyone to buy anything to enter high school? And anyway, MP3 *is* a standard, and for years it was *the* de facto standard for audio. What format are you using for your portable player?
It was the closest analogy I could think of. Regardless, MP3 is *NOT* an official standard, it's merely commonplace enough to be a de-facto one, and it'd be nice if you could appreciate the difference between those two concepts. The fact that most people are happy with committing blantant patent infringement is no reason to declare a patented format an official standard for the entirety of the web.
Citation needed. And don't give me stats like, "X people own DVD players, and lots of DVD players have DivX support." Yeah, lots of players have DivX support, but how many people are burning DivX movies to DVD for that purpose? And if you can come up with that stat, tell me how many of them are pirates anyway, and why they don't use a more sensible method for watching movies.
"Sensible"? what the fuck are you talking about? and honestly, if you're asking me for 'citations' I'd like to see yours as well, as (by your definition) it'd be irrelevant if a million people own h.264-capable devices if only a hundred use them to play h.264 content. Because if support is the only metric, then the fact that a non-zero percentage of DVD players supports DivX and zero of them support h.264 is enough proof, even ignoring the aforementioned fact of generic video players only supporting the former.
Well, in this case since it's just software patents it's not technically forever, it's "only" 20 years.
For reference though, Windows 3.1 turns 18 this month ;)
You'd have to be actively trying to do it worse than Flash already does. If the HTML5 standard wasn't such a blantant attempt by Apple to undermine Firefox and Opera I'd support it for the same reasons that the GP does, Flash's security record makes IE look like freaking Fort Knox.
Why not just kick H264 over to a media player (VLC/Quicktime/WMP) instead of trying to include codecs in browsers? That's an option, at least, since most media players will decode h264.
We tried that before, and it sucked so much we welcomed flash with open arms afterwards.
When you stop and think about it, it doesn't really make a ton of sense. Flash has worked as a stop-gap measure, but it really has never been a good way to handle things.
It does make sense. Thanks to Adobe's huge marketing power, regular users think of installing flash as an everyday thing, while asking them to install a video plugin still gives them Quicktime-induced nightmares of the 'dark ages' of the internet.
H264 is getting to be pretty darned ubiquitous, close to how MP3 was for audio back in the heyday of Napster.
No, it isn't. No DVD player supports it, and Blu-Ray players are far too expensive to be commonplace. Most generic video players only support DivX as well, and contrary to the average Slashdotter's opinion iPods are anything but 'ubiquitous' in that large area we call 'the rest of the world that's not the US'.
Also, technically you're supposed to pay a patent licensing fee for distributing MP3 encoders, MP3 decoders, and even MP3 files, so it really isn't that different.
Which is why we've never based an actual standard on it. Most people also pirate Photoshop, but that doesn't mean we're gonna pass a law requiring a copy of it to enter high-school, are we?
So who doesn't use H264 to encode their movies? In my experience, it's mostly (a) people who use Ogg for ideological reasons rather than practical reasons; and (b) pirates who are under the mistaken impression that the old DivX encoder provides better compression than H264, or believe that H264 is a proprietary Apple format.
And (c) people who are aware that DivX has far, *FAR* better penetration rates than h.264 and find the difference in size negligible compared to it. You may dismiss anything that doesn't support your favorite format as "legacy", but most of the world isn't in a rush to pay $300 for a new standalone player and another $300 for the latest iPod, so if being commonplace was your argument for h.264 you should be backing up DivX instead.
Just like Microsoft is going bankrupt trying to fight Apple on the desktop front, right? ohh, wait.
Different hardware doesn't imply incompatible software. Chances are all 50 of those will be running Android, and therefore not only will they be compatible among themselves, but with the myriad of phones (by myriad of different manufacturers) too.
Except its interface is the same worldwide, yet there's a disproportionately high number of iPod owners in the US compared to the rest of the world.
Sorry, but the 'interface' argument just stinks of self-justification. If other players' interfaces were so poor, don't you think the entire world would've swiched over? or at least, in countries whose economies could hardly afford iPods, have significantly lower penetration rates of MP3 players? yet neither is the case, people in South America own just as many MP3 players as people up north, except it's $30 generic pendrive-with-a-screen chinese manufactured MP3 players instead of shiny, Apple-sanctioned $300 iPods
Or maybe we're just smarter than you, and therefore able to learn complex and daunting interface paradigms such as 'press the Play button to play' without Apple simplifying it for us.
A better example, I think, would be education. Living without cars is fairly easy overall (except in the US, you people are truly backwards when it comes to designing cities), but there's almost no way to achieve a good standard of living without education in today's age and the same can be said for the Internet.
Firefox holds about 1/4 of the web browser market, and Opera is IIRC still the #1 mobile browser and Apple has shown great interest in capturing both markets in the past, so yes, they do have much to gain from increasing the barrier of entry to the market generally, and hurting Mozilla and Opera specifically.
But they shouldn't have to, that's the thing. Microsoft and Intel have already gotten in trouble for offering similar deals to OEMs to favor their products (the latter also in detriment of AMD), so it's not unconceivable that NVidia could be hit with a similar problem as well, as they also hold a significant share of the market in question and this could very well be interpreted as a move designed to keep a hold of it by unfair means.
If something is done with an HTML 5 video tag, it will(outside of nests of Free software idealists) almost certainly be h264.
You think? just like people only posted MPEG2 videos back in the days before Flash? no, what will happen is that everything will almost certainly be h.264, until there's a better codec out there (let's call it h.265) at which point half the content will be in h.264 and half in h.265, then large companies will smell the blood and jump in with their own, improved formats (let's call them WMV2) and lobby large content providers to use it, until browser makers start seeing h.264 as 'legacy' by being so incredibly inefficient compared to h.265 and WMV2 and drop support for it (it's not specified in the standard, remember?) and before you know it, we're in the exact same situation we had before Flash and all you've gained is that the propietary crap is wrapped in a 'video' tag rather than an 'object' one, for all the good that does to you.
No, the only solution is to specify *one* baseline codec that must be supported to comply with the standard, but leave web devs able to specify their own alternative if they so desire. That was what was going to happen with Theora as the baseline but devs able to specify h.264 or whatever shiny toy came later, until Apple began to pout and cry and refuse to implement Theora no matter what, leading us to the current situation.
Well, I think backwards compatibility is best dealt in the browser itself (as Microsoft did with IE8's compatiblity mode) rather than on the standard, specially if it can result in the simplification of the latter both to people implementing it and those creating content for it, as seemed the case with XHTML2.
Big guns? who, Chrome with its tiny marketshare and Safari with its even tinier one? the "big guns" of the browser market are either Microsoft and Mozilla, or just Microsoft depending on where do you draw the line, but only through massive levels of delusion could you arrive at the conclusion that Apple and Google are 'big guns' and Mozilla is merely a 'fringe' player.
It's funny and sad at the same time, when Microsoft's "we won't support anything" stance is actually likeable compared to what Apple is doing. They won't support what was originally meant to be the official standard, but at least they aren't trying to replace it with patented technology of their own. Though sadder still is when Adobe, bloated and corrupt Adobe, offers a more compelling alternative than either.
You forgot:
4. h.264 is free to Apple and a few select companies but not to anybody else thereby raising the barrier of entry to the market.
To be fair, many of the older C/C++ generation can't write their own algorithms either, for them the idea of an algorithm is "trick to make the computer do something faster" (bitwise operators and pointer arithmetic are a perennial favorite) rather than "redesign of the solution to reduce the work needed". They make a faster and more efficient Bubble Sort instead of just replacing it with a Quick Sort, to put it some way. And the older FORTRAN/COBOL guys are even worse in that respect.
If anything, Java and C# encourage programmers to learn proper algorithms by letting them focus on the core ideas and grand design rather than crude, line-by-line optimizations. Of course, Python, Ruby and Lua are even better, and pseudo-code with a human corrector is the ideal for that, but I take what I can get.
So yeah, I think all these elitism is just a big pile of horseshit. Sturgeon's Law applies to everything and everyone, of this generation and otherwise.
Err, no, not really. Rewriting simple code is easy, so it's usually done *while* writing the program, there's no need to wait until you're done to do it.
The really problematic part is changing the entire design which is why it's seldom done and, therefore, what always gets "patched" instead of remade when requirements change and deadlines tighten, making it where most of the "cruft" lies. And to properly redesign a program you *have* to do it from the ground up, trying to avoid that invariably leads to nothing but another patch thrown on top of the old ones, with all the problems that entails.
Books don't have source code.
Yes they do, it's the text itself. What distinguishes it from the end product is the formatting, type-setting and other niceties added for publishing, to which the publisher also owns the rights to, or at least a license as they'd be otherwise liable for infringement as well.
The "source code" for a book would be the author's imagination and creative ability. The publishing company most certainly doesn't own *that* after they buy the rights to a particular book.
Neither does a company with respect to the programmer's imagination and creative ability either.
In the software world, if I buy the rights to a program I'm buying the end result of a particular combination of code. I don't get the rights to the individual modules/libraries inside that code.
Yes, you do. You seem to be confusing "licensing" with "buying rights", however, which is the difference between buying tickets for a football match and buying the stadium outright.
Because its been the standard in consoles for far too long. Back in the days of the original NES, older C64 and Atari players *did* deride it for the same reasons, but eventually the fact that Nintendo marketed almost exclusively to children made it easier to dismiss it as a mere 'toy' instead of a real, useful machine, and their success drowned what little criticism remained. In contrast, WinMo and JavaME developers haven't even been pushed out of the market yet let alone been gone long enough to be forgotten, so obviously the criticism will be much louder.
Furthermore, I don't give a shit about whether it's their right or not to do so. I only care that *I* don't like it and it is my right to voice my displeasure with it.
Hell, they would've been great for a Windows 2000 box and even passable ones for XP if it were not for the scarce RAM.
Kids these days are far too used to these multi-core 3 Ghz monstrosities to have a good perspective on what machines can do.
But Flash still uses H.264 too. I don't see too many people, either normal web users, webmasters or those making Flash applets complaining.
That's because Adobe is the one footing the bill for MPEG's patent licenses. If it were *them*, the actual users and webmasters, the bitchfest would be simply epic (well, mostly from webmasters, users would just torrent a pirated version from TPB or something).
And if anything is "fundamentalist" in this discussion, is the idea that performance trumps everything else, regardless of circumstances. You'd think all those arguing for h.264 due to its performance would be using IBM mainframes to post on Slashdot instead of going the el-cheapo route and assembling a regular "PC", given how little regard they give to the patent royalties that's been announced already, and the plethora of practical concerns that raises. Or, most likely, they're just planning on using a pirated encoder and try to get away with it by being a small player.
The same was said of HTML itself when Microsoft decided to 'fork' it with IE. Sure it took a long time for the dust to settle and Microsoft to accept defeat and finally implement the actual standard, but if we even took on Microsoft itself I doubt we'd fare any worse against the much smaller Google and Apple.
Just keep patents off the official standard. Sooner or later they'll learn the idiocy of patented standards, and its best we don't have to fork it over when they do, specially given the W3C is now the only standards body with any sort of credibility whatsoever.
The patent-free, open source and free are very rarely any good selling points.
Really? guess somebody should tell game devs that, then, and make them pony up the cash for AAC instead of using Ogg Vorbis for their engines.
When you want to ensure your product reaches the biggest amount of people, the best thing to do is to pick a patent and royalty-free standard as the base, and *then* work around the technical details, because nothing alienates hobbyists more than a third-party going around suing your customers for unpaid royalties. For a game engine such things are important, but for a web standard as is the case here, it's vital.
Polished art, story and music Battle for Wesnoth, and to top it off it's the best turn-based tactical game ever (HoMM? bleh. KB? good, but Wesnoth is better).
But there are huge problems towards developing story-based open source games, which Wesnoth averts mostly by making it extremely easy for a single man to create a campaign of his own: single-player games you usually play once, twice at most. Hard to keep interested in improving a game when you've already played through it a dozen times, and you know you'll have to play it a dozen more just to test the changes you're making.
And that's, also, why there's such a plethora of great multiplayer F/OSS games out there. Warsow in particular not only looks gorgeous, it's also the best arena shooter since UT2004 in terms of gameplay and that's because, when the devs improve the game, they improve it for *them* as well, not just for everybody else.
The fact that many of them, for some unknown and likely twisted reason, still use WMV of all things?
That old adage that the porn industry leads in technology and everybody else follows doesn't *quite* match reality, from what I've seen.