7 ms·

I like how Mozilla gets all the blame for refusing to support a non-free solution, instead of Google, Apple, and Microsoft for choosing a proprietary solution.

andrewfox 17y ago
I think the idea that the article is “hating” or “blaming” Mozilla for anything is just a little bit overdoing it. To say the least. The article goes out of its way to empathise with and respect the Mozilla position.
bcrescimanno 17y ago
I'd personally contend that MS, Apple, and Google didn't "choose proprietary," they chose 1) the current market leading format 2) ...that has the most video content available online already 3) ...that can be hardware accelarated 4) ...that offers the best quality to size ratio.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- daleharvey 17y ago
  none of those change the fact that they "chose proprietary"
  - bcrescimanno 17y ago
    Sure--but they chose pragmatically. Proprietary vs. open was not as major a factor as say; not forcing 9 of 10 businesses to re-encode all of their video if they want it to work with Firefox.
    - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
      Yes, it's entirely pragmatic for Apple and Microsoft to choose an option that can't be implemented in Free Software or even free software produced by small companies. Anti-competitive actions are always pragmatic if you're not going to get punished for them. I don't really blame them though. The US government allows software patents and has a terrible patent system that massively favours entrenched interests and blessed the MPEG patent pool which created the current mess. (Bear in mind that the US government spent most of the 20th century breaking up patent pools because they were anti-competitive). People say "there's too many patents around video codecs" but no one stops to ask why. The answer is because anyone who gets a patent into MPEG gets an equal cut of the profits, doesn't matter how small, useless or even counter-productive your idea is. It all adds to the patent thicket that prevents competition. How can anyone say with a straight face that they are choosing a bureaucratic monopoly because quality is so important to them?
      - GHFigs 17y ago
        You're saying it's anti-competitive for companies to act in accordance with their own interests rather than go out of their way to support their competitors?
        ZeroGravitas 17y ago
        Yes. Why would acting in their own interests be assumed to be pro-competitive? The "invisible hand" that turns corporate self-interest into something socially beneficial only works when there is free competition and erecting barriers to entry (by excluding those who can't or won't pay patent fees) is by definition anti-competitive. This is why countries like China are pushing for royalty-free standards. Even communist countries understand that open standards and competition are a benefit.
        BigZaphod 17y ago
        If companies didn't act in their own interests there wouldn't be competition!
        ZeroGravitas 17y ago
        Can I suggest to you that, if they were not barred from doing so by law, any rational and profit driven business would eventually merge with all its market rivals to form a monopoly and extract monopoly rents? I think the facts of history are on my side here (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act). I am suggesting (in line with what I thought were the commonly accepted tenets of free market capitalism) that their self-interest be channelled, not that this motive is intrinsically bad, just that it is not intrinsically good since externalities and market failures can be exploited in the name of corporate self-interest without any compensating benefit to society. "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." -- Adam Smith
        GHFigs 17y ago
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- docgnome 17y ago
  You're right of course. Free vs Non-Free had nothing to do with it. I just really hate how everyone is hating on Mozilla for making a choice that is consistent with their principles.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - blasdel 17y ago
    They have a custom auto-installer for Flash baked into Firefox, and they've even distributed the binaries to it from addons.mozilla.org. Nobody that hasn't already been wanking over it is going to start using Theora. Authors will just fall back to Flash playing h.264 in mp4 containers via HTTP like they've been doing for years, which Mozilla is eager to support. There's nothing consistent about their principles.
    - dtf 17y ago
      They don't have to cough up $5 million to support Flash. That's a priniciple I can understand.
      - blasdel 17y ago
        I wouldn't be surprised if they'd spent millions promoting Theora to the exclusion of all else (they reinvent the wheel by linking directly with liboggplay, instead of using libavcodec or the platform DS/QT/GS like everyone else) The salaries of all the cheerleaders and wheel-reinventors have to add up to something substantial. They've got piles of Google cash — they stopped begging for donations after their $60m search-referral windfall in 2006 got publicized, but they've gotten secretive about their financials after that.
        kinetik 17y ago
        Google will help you find more recent financial details. The 2008 financials are right here: http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2009/11/19/state-of-mozilla-and-2008/ http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2009/11/19/state-of-mozilla-a...
- jmillikin 17y ago
  I don't think it's fair to blame Google here -- after all, Chrome supports Theora and Vorbis natively. If they want to pay for licenses, that's their decision. The problem is when a browser doesn't support Theora/Vorbis at all, such as Safari or current news regarding IE9. I'm personally hoping that the released version of IE9 will support Theora/Vorbis -- very unlikely, but a man can dream.
  - reconbot 17y ago
    I'm really confused why chrome (and now IE9) doesn't support Theora/Vorbis when it's FREE and USEFUL for them to do so. I think I'm missing something. I do know if you build your own Chromium you can use a non neutered library of ffmpeg and play every codec it supports instead of just mp4.
    - kinetik 17y ago
      Chrome (and Chromium) ship with support for Ogg Theora and Vorbis. I'm not sure where this misconception comes from.
      - spatulon 17y ago
        The misconception comes from Google not wanting to use Theora on Youtube.
    - jmillikin 17y ago
      (I think the "chrome" in your post is a typo, do you mean Safari?) Apple doesn't support Theora in Safari because the iPhone doesn't have a Theora hardware decoder. They bluster a bit about submarine patents, but really, their refusal boils down to the iPhone. If desktop Safari supports Theora and the iPhone doesn't, users will complain. If playing some videos on the iPhone uses the battery faster than advertised, users will complain. Microsoft, of course, has a long-lasting and well-documented dislike towards open formats. Whether IE9 supports Theora and Vorbis will depend on internal company politics -- "Free Is Bad" vs. "Lets Not Fuck Up IE Again".
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

andrewfox 17y ago

I think the idea that the article is “hating” or “blaming” Mozilla for anything is just a little bit overdoing it. To say the least. The article goes out of its way to empathise with and respect the Mozilla position.

bcrescimanno 17y ago

I'd personally contend that MS, Apple, and Google didn't "choose proprietary," they chose 1) the current market leading format 2) ...that has the most video content available online already 3) ...that can be hardware accelarated 4) ...that offers the best quality to size ratio.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
daleharvey 17y ago
none of those change the fact that they "chose proprietary"
- bcrescimanno 17y ago
  Sure--but they chose pragmatically. Proprietary vs. open was not as major a factor as say; not forcing 9 of 10 businesses to re-encode all of their video if they want it to work with Firefox.
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    Yes, it's entirely pragmatic for Apple and Microsoft to choose an option that can't be implemented in Free Software or even free software produced by small companies. Anti-competitive actions are always pragmatic if you're not going to get punished for them. I don't really blame them though. The US government allows software patents and has a terrible patent system that massively favours entrenched interests and blessed the MPEG patent pool which created the current mess. (Bear in mind that the US government spent most of the 20th century breaking up patent pools because they were anti-competitive). People say "there's too many patents around video codecs" but no one stops to ask why. The answer is because anyone who gets a patent into MPEG gets an equal cut of the profits, doesn't matter how small, useless or even counter-productive your idea is. It all adds to the patent thicket that prevents competition. How can anyone say with a straight face that they are choosing a bureaucratic monopoly because quality is so important to them?
    - GHFigs 17y ago
      You're saying it's anti-competitive for companies to act in accordance with their own interests rather than go out of their way to support their competitors?
      - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
        Yes. Why would acting in their own interests be assumed to be pro-competitive? The "invisible hand" that turns corporate self-interest into something socially beneficial only works when there is free competition and erecting barriers to entry (by excluding those who can't or won't pay patent fees) is by definition anti-competitive. This is why countries like China are pushing for royalty-free standards. Even communist countries understand that open standards and competition are a benefit.
        BigZaphod 17y ago
        If companies didn't act in their own interests there wouldn't be competition!
        ZeroGravitas 17y ago
        Can I suggest to you that, if they were not barred from doing so by law, any rational and profit driven business would eventually merge with all its market rivals to form a monopoly and extract monopoly rents? I think the facts of history are on my side here (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act). I am suggesting (in line with what I thought were the commonly accepted tenets of free market capitalism) that their self-interest be channelled, not that this motive is intrinsically bad, just that it is not intrinsically good since externalities and market failures can be exploited in the name of corporate self-interest without any compensating benefit to society. "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." -- Adam Smith
        GHFigs 17y ago
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
docgnome 17y ago
You're right of course. Free vs Non-Free had nothing to do with it. I just really hate how everyone is hating on Mozilla for making a choice that is consistent with their principles.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- blasdel 17y ago
  They have a custom auto-installer for Flash baked into Firefox, and they've even distributed the binaries to it from addons.mozilla.org. Nobody that hasn't already been wanking over it is going to start using Theora. Authors will just fall back to Flash playing h.264 in mp4 containers via HTTP like they've been doing for years, which Mozilla is eager to support. There's nothing consistent about their principles.
  - dtf 17y ago
    They don't have to cough up $5 million to support Flash. That's a priniciple I can understand.
    - blasdel 17y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if they'd spent millions promoting Theora to the exclusion of all else (they reinvent the wheel by linking directly with liboggplay, instead of using libavcodec or the platform DS/QT/GS like everyone else) The salaries of all the cheerleaders and wheel-reinventors have to add up to something substantial. They've got piles of Google cash — they stopped begging for donations after their $60m search-referral windfall in 2006 got publicized, but they've gotten secretive about their financials after that.
      - kinetik 17y ago
        Google will help you find more recent financial details. The 2008 financials are right here: http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2009/11/19/state-of-mozilla-and-2008/ http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2009/11/19/state-of-mozilla-a...
jmillikin 17y ago
I don't think it's fair to blame Google here -- after all, Chrome supports Theora and Vorbis natively. If they want to pay for licenses, that's their decision. The problem is when a browser doesn't support Theora/Vorbis at all, such as Safari or current news regarding IE9. I'm personally hoping that the released version of IE9 will support Theora/Vorbis -- very unlikely, but a man can dream.
- reconbot 17y ago
  I'm really confused why chrome (and now IE9) doesn't support Theora/Vorbis when it's FREE and USEFUL for them to do so. I think I'm missing something. I do know if you build your own Chromium you can use a non neutered library of ffmpeg and play every codec it supports instead of just mp4.
  - kinetik 17y ago
    Chrome (and Chromium) ship with support for Ogg Theora and Vorbis. I'm not sure where this misconception comes from.
    - spatulon 17y ago
      The misconception comes from Google not wanting to use Theora on Youtube.
  - jmillikin 17y ago
    (I think the "chrome" in your post is a typo, do you mean Safari?) Apple doesn't support Theora in Safari because the iPhone doesn't have a Theora hardware decoder. They bluster a bit about submarine patents, but really, their refusal boils down to the iPhone. If desktop Safari supports Theora and the iPhone doesn't, users will complain. If playing some videos on the iPhone uses the battery faster than advertised, users will complain. Microsoft, of course, has a long-lasting and well-documented dislike towards open formats. Whether IE9 supports Theora and Vorbis will depend on internal company politics -- "Free Is Bad" vs. "Lets Not Fuck Up IE Again".

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]