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The whole idea of Mozilla and Google pushing vp8 (and later vp9) as the WebRTC standard was so that we would FINALLY have royalty free fully open source impleme

The whole idea of Mozilla and Google pushing vp8 (and later vp9) as the WebRTC standard was so that we would FINALLY have royalty free fully open source implementations which could be implemented/ported everywhere with no cost. Atleast that's what I thought, but with this move Mozilla has shown that the 'royalty free open webstandards' which they touted as their goal was in reality 'as long as it's royalty free for _us_ to ship', as they are now switching sides one week before the voting and suddenly backs h264, which will only be royalty free if you accept a binary blob from Cisco. I am truly disheartened by this move, and I can only assume that the hiring of Monty to work on Dalaa was just a calculated way of trying to mitigate the criticism by saying: 'look, we still believe in an open royalty free codec, sometime in the far future', which is weak as it's not as if Dalaa is even poised to compete with HEVC and VP9, but against whatever comes next. And that is assuming that Dalaa will actually end up competitive at all, and if so, also having been able to avoid treading on the sadly insanely broad software patents that litter the video encoding field. I think it's a huge betrayal of the principles they (Mozilla) have claimed to uphold, and the result is likely that we will end up with a binary blob for WebRTC standardisation come the vote, I'm so very disappointed.

pornel 13y ago
> 'as long as it's royalty free for _us_ to ship' The deal makes it free (as in beer) for everybody. Mozilla could afford licensing H.264 for Firefox long time ago, but they've been fighting for license that allows anybody to build fully-functional Firefox fork (unlike Google — they bought H.264 for closed-source Chrome, but left FOSS Chromium without H.264 playback).
- gillianseed 13y ago
  >The deal makes it free (as in beer) for everybody. No, it only makes it free (as in beer) for those who will (and is supported) use the Cisco binary.
  - alcari 13y ago
    Willingness to use it doesn't affect how free (as in beer) it is. It does affect how free (as in speech) it is, but that's not what the grandparent was arguing, and there's a huge difference between the two.
    - gillianseed 13y ago
      You are now reliant to the benevolence of Cisco to provide binaries for the system of your choice if you want to make use of WebRTC royalty free.
      - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
        Actually, assuming that MPEG-LA allows this Cisco scheme to happen then any corporation who's at the MPEG-LA yearly cap could offer this same scheme for free (and no cost to themselves) too e.g. possibly Google, Microsoft, Apple.

pornel 13y ago

> 'as long as it's royalty free for _us_ to ship' The deal makes it free (as in beer) for everybody. Mozilla could afford licensing H.264 for Firefox long time ago, but they've been fighting for license that allows anybody to build fully-functional Firefox fork (unlike Google — they bought H.264 for closed-source Chrome, but left FOSS Chromium without H.264 playback).

gillianseed 13y ago
>The deal makes it free (as in beer) for everybody. No, it only makes it free (as in beer) for those who will (and is supported) use the Cisco binary.
- alcari 13y ago
  Willingness to use it doesn't affect how free (as in beer) it is. It does affect how free (as in speech) it is, but that's not what the grandparent was arguing, and there's a huge difference between the two.
  - gillianseed 13y ago
    You are now reliant to the benevolence of Cisco to provide binaries for the system of your choice if you want to make use of WebRTC royalty free.
    - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
      Actually, assuming that MPEG-LA allows this Cisco scheme to happen then any corporation who's at the MPEG-LA yearly cap could offer this same scheme for free (and no cost to themselves) too e.g. possibly Google, Microsoft, Apple.