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VP8 was developed as patented proprietary technology by On2, and the only innovation since Google purchased the company has been picking a container format. It
by GHFigs 14y ago
VP8 was developed as patented proprietary technology by On2, and the only innovation since Google purchased the company has been picking a container format.
It might be solid gold in every other respect, but it's not a very good example of open source innovation or of patents harming innovation.
- ZeroGravitas 14y agoOnly if you define innovation narrowly. Would you say x264 has no "video codec innovation"? If so you can conclude that VP8 innovation stopped when the spec was frozen. (And that's not even counting VP9 which builds on the foundation of VP8, or the Hantro VP8 hardware development).
- kragen 14y agoIndeed, but On2's patents on what they invented are not shielding Google from the expropriation of their work by Nokia, using other patents. It seems to me that, while patents are perhaps intended to secure your ownership of your invention, in this case they are calling On2's ownership of On2's invention into question, and the patents On2 filed are not helping at all. If patent offices had simply rejected all the related patent applications out of hand, Google would now be in a much better position.
- ZeroGravitas 14y agoThat's one of the mental traps of the term "Intellectual Property", it doesn't protect what you own, it only allows you to stop other people from doing things (and therefor charge them in order to get your permision). But other people can use the same mechanism to stop you doing things with your own "property". That's why the asymmetric warfare of patent trolls works so well, they don't actually do anything you can interfere with via your IP.
- kragen 14y agoTo put it another way, patents work to prevent innovation, but they don't work to protect innovation.