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Can we all please collectively stop abusing 'Openness'? Google is the guiltiest of them all- shoe-horning open source, open standards, royalty-free, patent-unen

Can we all please collectively stop abusing 'Openness'? Google is the guiltiest of them all- shoe-horning open source, open standards, royalty-free, patent-unencumbered and god knows what else into the same overly-generic term complicates the debate. In fact, its clearly harmful- look at the way Gruber has hijacked the debate and refocused everything on Google's 'hypocrisy' for bundling Flash with Chrome. For the love of God, stop saying 'Openness'

jokermatt999 16y ago
That's actually a good point. From the reaction of Gruber/Ars Technica, Google may have been better off without using the word "open" at all. They were already speaking to mostly technical people anyway, so it's not like they're going to lose their audience when they speak about wanting a "patent and fee unencumbered format" and what that means rather than a vague "open" format. Edit: I think it's harder to argue against those points than it is to point to their hypocrisy in using both open and Flash (although I think that argument ignores the fact that they have to pick their battles, and Flash would not be one they could win). The "patent unencumbered" part seems to only be answered with vague accusations about possible patent infringement. The only real analysis on that is one blog post by a codec engineer, and as people here have pointed out, it makes more sense to trust that Google's patent lawyers looked at a multimillion dollar acquisition a lot harder than that analysis. The fee part was answered pretty weakly in the Ars article. Fees would cripple open source projects, and they just tried to gloss over that by pointing to Google.
- spiffworks 16y ago
  Yeah, Google really screwed themselves with that blogpost. To quote from a ZDNet article "Out of 250 words, open was mentioned 8 times." I don't know why they feel the necessity to paint everything that they do as open. This move itself could have been explained in one line like so: "We believe that the de facto codec for HTML5 video should be royalty-free, and to that end cannot continue supporting H.264 in our browser any longer." That much would have sufficed, and avoided a lot of the pointless bickering.

jokermatt999 16y ago

That's actually a good point. From the reaction of Gruber/Ars Technica, Google may have been better off without using the word "open" at all. They were already speaking to mostly technical people anyway, so it's not like they're going to lose their audience when they speak about wanting a "patent and fee unencumbered format" and what that means rather than a vague "open" format. Edit: I think it's harder to argue against those points than it is to point to their hypocrisy in using both open and Flash (although I think that argument ignores the fact that they have to pick their battles, and Flash would not be one they could win). The "patent unencumbered" part seems to only be answered with vague accusations about possible patent infringement. The only real analysis on that is one blog post by a codec engineer, and as people here have pointed out, it makes more sense to trust that Google's patent lawyers looked at a multimillion dollar acquisition a lot harder than that analysis. The fee part was answered pretty weakly in the Ars article. Fees would cripple open source projects, and they just tried to gloss over that by pointing to Google.

spiffworks 16y ago
Yeah, Google really screwed themselves with that blogpost. To quote from a ZDNet article "Out of 250 words, open was mentioned 8 times." I don't know why they feel the necessity to paint everything that they do as open. This move itself could have been explained in one line like so: "We believe that the de facto codec for HTML5 video should be royalty-free, and to that end cannot continue supporting H.264 in our browser any longer." That much would have sufficed, and avoided a lot of the pointless bickering.