Hi. I have personally been developing open source media codecs for 20 years. I've had a lot of help from other open source developers. I have been paid by Mozi

Hi. I have personally been developing open source media codecs for 20 years. I've had a lot of help from other open source developers. I have been paid by Mozilla to do this in some capacity for a decade. The budget for our entire team (which is the largest it has ever been), is less than the cost for just Mozilla to license H.264, by a non-trivial margin. Here are some of the things that team has done: - Made a Theora (VP3) encoder easily superior (in quality/bit) to what Youtube was shipping in Flash at the time (VP6), and (favorably) comparable with H.264 baseline. - Developed and standardized the Opus audio codec. - Provided infrastructure and maintainence for Xiph's older codecs (Vorbis, Speex, FLAC, etc.). - Provided some minor assistance to VP8 and VP9 development. - Made a from-scratch video codec (Daala) competitive with HEVC while avoiding the patents (i.e., with one hand tied behind our backs). - Made significant contributions to a video codec superior to HEVC (AV1). Now, maybe you want to call all of that almost nothing, but this code is in every Apple and Android handset in existence, and every current desktop browser, and used by some of the largest websites in the world (Youtube, Wikipedia). The major concern with open source development is the free rider problem: why should Media Company X spend resources on an open source codec when Google will build one for them? But the value current patent holders are attempting to extract from an individual licensee is larger than the cost for them to develop the technology from scratch by themselves. That value isn't created by the technology. It's created by having a common standard. And we don't need patents to incentivize that.