Step back
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| jezuch Jan 14, 2011 3:12 AM EDT |
It may be a step back, but sometimes you have to back off a little in order to choose a better route. Every computer scientist will tell you that "greedy strategies" are very rarely optimal ;) |
| r_a_trip Jan 14, 2011 5:23 AM EDT |
Maybe we should ditch the word "open" when it comes to technology. The word has been redefined so many times, it has all but lost its meaning. I'll readily admit that I didn't read the whole article. The first page already was dripping with unusable semantics. Maybe we should define "standards" in new categories. Standards are either published or unpublished and for pay or not for pay. That gives us: Unpublished, for pay. Unpublished, not for pay. Published, for pay. Published, not for pay. The web will thrive on not for pay infrastructure. Nobody is waiting on a web where you are nickled and dimed to death by every visit to a page. When looking at it in that light, what Google is doing isn't that bad. Whether WebM is "Unpublished, not for pay" or "Published, not for pay" is up for debate, but it is not for pay. H.264 is tentatively "not for pay" for web video as long as the end user doesn't pay, but what is payment? Is looking at advertisements at a webpage "payment" for video? Right now, the safer choice for web video simply seems to be VP8 and Vorbis in a WebM container. Whether Google is just purely self-serving or if there is a shimmer of altruism, the end result is the same. A big player backs a usable, (IMO) "Published, not for pay" codec, which doesn't seem to have any field of use restrictions. The world at large benefits. At worst this move is an inconvenience to those who seem to be glued to H.264. |
| Ridcully Jan 14, 2011 5:37 AM EDT |
There is a very large and very recent discussion on this topic at: http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/31418/ |
| hkwint Jan 14, 2011 12:31 PM EDT |
r_a_trip: Hey, you just summed up the article I planned to write! However, I planned to deal with more than only 2 properties in the "openness spectrum", but still it's a good summary. |
| pmpatrick Jan 14, 2011 4:56 PM EDT |
This article should come with a big disclaimer - the author, Peter Bright, is ars technica's Microsoft editor and consistently cheer leads for anything MS is in favor of. MS is a big H.264 supporter and member of the owning consortium, holding, at last count, 30 of the consortium's patents. In short, MS stands to profit if H.264 is widely adopted and lose if its not. Also, as I understand it, Google is not completely dropping H.264 support in Chrome; they are still bundling a flash player with Chrome that includes H.264. They are just disallowing H.264 outside a flash container. I guess it's Google's way of telling Apple, another consortium member, to go stuff it. |
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