Now that Google has completed its acquisition of video compression outfit On2 Technologies, a representative of the Free Software Foundation has urged Mountain View to release On2's latest codec under an irrevocable free license and use it to replace Adobe Flash on YouTube. "With your purchase of On2, you now own both the …

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Monday 22nd February 2010 10:11 GMT Sean Timarco Baggaley

Freetard?

Entitlementard, more like.

"You owe it to the public and to the medium that made you successful to solve this problem..."

Google owe precisely sod all to anybody except their shareholders. They're a business, not a charity. This idiot might want to look up those terms in a dictionary and educate himself.

Maybe if the FSF could whine a little less, cut out the tiresome politics and actually DO something for themselves instead of constantly demanding that commercial entities give them a free ride, they might be taken a little more seriously by those who actually have to earn a living.

So far, the sum total of the FSF's output is a mediocre clone of an OS first released in the 1970s, clones of outdated, equally mediocre software, and a big, steaming pile of petty, balkanising "licenses" which don't do anything the existing, legally-endorsed concept of Public Domain didn't already do far better—and with NO strings attached.

If "Free* Software" cannot stand on its own, it has no business trying to coerce other entities into supporting its failed model.

* (Albeit a peculiar definition of "Free" which comes with an awful lot of strings attached. Unlike Public Domain, which is entirely unencumbered with such strings and genuinely involves giving up control over the fruits of your labour—you know, like one of those "gift" or "donation" things. The hypocrisy of FSF fans railing against Apple's control-freak design philosophy is truly spectacular. At least Apple don't go around calling it "Freedom" in a display of Orwellian newspeak.)

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1. Monday 22nd February 2010 10:57 GMT A J Stiles
  
  Problem with Public Domain
  
  The problem with the Public Domain is that in many jurisdictions, it isn't protected.
  
  If the law required that every derivative work of a Public Domain work be itself in the Public Domain, and more importantly that the Source Code of every computer program be available to every one of its users, then there wouldn't be a problem with dedicating stuff to the Public Domain.
  
  But as it stands, in many jurisdictions it's entirely legal to take a PD work, make a derivative work, claim copyright on it and then cage up the Source Code. Which is why we need the GPL: to protect users' freedoms.
  
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  1. Monday 22nd February 2010 11:41 GMT Sean Timarco Baggaley
    
    Er, no.
    
    You can only claim copyright on the bits you add to a Public Domain work. You don't get to sue people for making *their own* derivative products based on the original Public Domain work.
    
    Just because someone's added a few paragraphs and chapters to, say, Austen's "Pride & Prejudice", it doesn't mean nobody else can use "Pride & Prejudice" as a basis for their own work.
    
    Once a work is in the Public Domain—and in many regions, this has to be done *explicitly*; there's no such concept as "abandonware", for example—IT CANNOT BE COPYRIGHTED AGAIN. Ever. The end.
    
    The BBC is *famous* for recycling old Public Domain works, for f*ck's sake. It's not rocket science. The BBC's own *adaptation* of "Pride & Prejudice" is copyrighted to them, but *the original work remains in the Public Domain*.
    
    How the hell do you think the Gutenberg Project has survived for so long?
    
    Source code is just words on a screen. It's subject to copyright like any other written work. There is no need for additional licensing bollocks. The GPLs are all about credit and attaching strings to what are supposed to be *gifts*. GNU and FSF are founded on the assumption that everyone is guilty of being a thieving bastard. Nice.
    
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2. Monday 22nd February 2010 12:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  You're the 'tard
  
  You post is so wrong on so many points that I am gonna assume that you are a lover of things Microsoft, mainly because of the 'balkanising licenses' bit and the 'people who have to earn a living' that has been trumpeted by Microsoft fanboys for so long that it just gets tiring listening to you morons, but lets just assume you're an idiot and cut to the chase of your post: Public Domain.
  
  OK, I write a product and put it in public domain. What happens? A nasty proprietary company comes along, makes a little change, re-releases it under a proprietary license and then sues to get MY product off of public domain. Basically, taken my work and denies everyone else the use of it unless they pay.
  
  Same can happen under BSD license except the original must remain under BSD. Nasty proprietary company can leech off my work . At least with GPL they have to contribute back!
  
  You just come across as a leecher. You want to work off the back of others as you are incapable of doing the stuff yourself.
  
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  1. Monday 22nd February 2010 15:44 GMT Sean Timarco Baggaley
    
    Oh please.
    
    I've pointed out in my earlier reply that Public Domain has been around for *generations*. Far, far longer than you or I have even been alive. So... please feel free to cite any examples of the behaviour you claim is so rampant.
    
    Releasing software into the Public Domain was commonplace in the 1980s. Ask anyone who ever owned a Commodore Amiga or Atari ST.
    
    You seem to be claiming that the entire Fred Fish PD library of Amiga software didn't happen because it was an impossibility. It happened. You are wrong. QED.
    
    And I have no idea what the hell makes you think I'm a Microsoft fanboy. I've been involved in the IT sector since the early '80s and have used more—and far more innovative—operating systems over the decades than you've probably had hot dinners. I hate all the current operating systems with a passion the depth of which you cannot even begin to conceive.
    
    I use OS X. Apple's holistic design philosophy fits my own views on the subject better than any of the competitors. So that's your Microsoft fanboy ad-hominem disproved too.
    
    Enough.
    
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    1. Monday 22nd February 2010 16:53 GMT A J Stiles
      
      1980s Public Domain software
      
      And where's all this amazing software now, that was released into the Public Domain in the 1980s?
      
      Answer, it's scattered to the four winds.
      
      If there are any machines still left around in lofts and backs of wardrobes that can read the weirdy format discs, they will be full of arcane pre-compiled binaries, and they will need an emulator to be usable at all. The Source Code -- the one thing that would be needed to do anything useful with this software, like run it natively on a modern machine and make improvements to it to reflect how times have changed (for instance, telephone numbers are are 11 digits long since 1994, not 10) -- is long gone.
      
      What a waste.
      
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    2. Monday 22nd February 2010 19:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
      
      Re: Oh please.
      
      "I've pointed out in my earlier reply that Public Domain has been around for *generations*. Far, far longer than you or I have even been alive. So... please feel free to cite any examples of the behaviour you claim is so rampant."
      
      Although it's not as permissive as public domain code, it is widely known that Microsoft have incorporated BSD-licensed code in Windows and other products, and you won't get to see the sources of the derived works. Given that Microsoft actually have to preserve the copyright and licensing notices (or get sued for copyright infringement), at least we have a record of that behaviour - with public domain code, there need not be any such record.
      
      "Releasing software into the Public Domain was commonplace in the 1980s. Ask anyone who ever owned a Commodore Amiga or Atari ST."
      
      So? In the microcomputer era, most thinking about sharing software was done in terms that are very unsophisticated by today's standards, which is why in the backwaters of the surviving niche platforms (and in the retro scene) some people have difficulty thinking about anything other than "commercial software", "shareware", "freeware" and "public domain" even today. And when people released stuff as "public domain", quite often the source code didn't come with it, so there was no notion of the sustainability that distribution of the sources gives the recipient - it was all "free as in gratis" and "we're not paying for anything", except when you were paying some library for their oh so expensive effort of compiling yet another volume of stuff they'd found on Usenet or some BBS and shovelling it out to everyone without a net or dial-up connection.
      
      That you parade the usual flawed argument about a specific notion of freedom and accuse the FSF of being dishonest, apparently without having read any of their motivations which explain which kind of freedom they seek to guarantee, is evidence enough that all you bring to this discussion is a lack of insight into the legitimate goals of copyleft-style software licensing, a lack of understanding as to why such goals might be useful for people (which is very pertinent to that microcomputer crowd and the abandoned proprietary software that haunts their now-legacy data), ignorance of what the FSF's licensing achievements actually are (hint: the most popular FOSS licence is the GPL), ignorance of the breadth of GNU and copyleft-licensed software, and a complete lack of comprehension that people might not be cranking out stuff specifically for you to use as if it were your own.
      
      Particularly this latter point should shine quite some light on your "entitlement" rhetoric. Next time you (or your corporate sweetheart, Apple) lament the lack of stuff to shove under the hood of something, in order to be able to weld it shut and ship binaries to end-users on an upgrade treadmill, you might want to get a sense of self-reflection and, well, reflect on that.
      
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  2. Monday 22nd February 2010 20:14 GMT ThomH
    
    (untitled)
    
    If you put a product in the public domain and a nasty proprietary company comes along, makes a little change and re-releases it under a proprietary licence, that does not give them any sort of ability to remove your product from the public domain. You're fundamentally wrong on that point.
    
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    1. Tuesday 23rd February 2010 13:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
      
      Re: (untitled)
      
      "If you put a product in the public domain and a nasty proprietary company comes along, makes a little change and re-releases it under a proprietary licence, that does not give them any sort of ability to remove your product from the public domain."
      
      This is true, and is frequently given as an argument for permissively-licensed software: "People can still download your version!" But all the people making this argument forget that people make software available for different reasons. You may say "do what you like, I don't care" with your software, but that can mean that instead of encouraging people to build on your work and extend your gift to others, they can improve it whilst withdrawing most of the privileges you originally extended to recipients. In short, you're letting them use your code as if it were their own.
      
      Many people don't want to just hand over their work in such a way. Instead, they want people to build on that work and to extend the same privileges on the improved work to those people who receive it. As a result, the "freedom" of the code is sustained: it doesn't matter who you get the code from or which level of improvement it has, the privileges you enjoy remain the same.
      
      Most of the whining that people engage in about copyleft licensing (as we've seen in this discussion already) is of the form of a petulant outburst about it being "unfair" that people make stuff available to them "for free" and yet don't let them use that stuff as if they'd written it themselves. A clue to those people: while something called "copyright" still exists, the natural state of any work denies you any privileges over such work at all; such whining about "gifts" and the usual rhetoric is like trash-talking Santa Claus because he gave you a pony and you've just decided that you wanted a horse.
      
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Monday 22nd February 2010 10:12 GMT Rob Farnell

I just don't get this

Google just spent a small fortune acquiring On2 and people just want them to give its best asset for free. If you think for a moment what will happen if Google don't open it up, I think the motive for purchasing On2 speaks for itself. The two biggest browsers on the market don't support the new HTML5 YouTube, but behold, Google Chrome does and a decent proportion of people will migrate to the browser. If all the Firefox users in the lands used Chrome instead, they could make up the costs for the On2 acquisition by not paying Firefox commission in 1 year.

I'm not sure whether the On2 technology relates to the h264 licensing model, but if it doesn't then isn't this just a moot point?

JR

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1. Monday 22nd February 2010 11:16 GMT Old Marcus
  
  Actually,,,
  
  Firefox has supported HTML5, specifically video, since 3.5. Get your facts right.
  
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2. Monday 22nd February 2010 13:35 GMT Pantera
  
  doubt
  
  if that will be reason enough for people to change browsers.
  
  besides, if google links youtube to chrome they would be in problems, os and browser or website (huge one) with browser.
  
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Monday 22nd February 2010 10:12 GMT Anonymous Coward

Past Licensing

On2 have been busy selling licenses to use VP8 to companies who want to get ahead of the game in video compression, and charging them huge fees for the privilege. Companies that would be rightfully rather upset if all that investment was suddenly nullified by it being release to the public for free.

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Monday 22nd February 2010 10:16 GMT John Barrett

Plugin?

"We question whether yet another plug-in is the best of ideas"

Erm, where's this plugin? The idea is to replace all these terrible plugins (especially the egregious Flash) with built-in browser support.

If some variety of VP8 were to be released under a useful license then all browser vendors could link in nice, fast support using native, hardware renderers like GL or overlay. Fast loading, high performance, really cross-platform web video. Wouldn't that be nice?

Apple's patent FUD notwithstanding, the VP8 codec is only realy necessary if you find theora's btistream that inefficient - there are constant improvements in the encoder. Recent comparison here:

http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html

Shatner is looking pretty these days... be nice if it had a low bitrate video comparison available, though.

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Monday 22nd February 2010 10:16 GMT A J Stiles

Codecs should never be patentable

A codec is purely and simply a mathematical operation. All it does is transform one list of numbers into another list of numbers. Such things should never, ever be patentable.

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1. Monday 22nd February 2010 20:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Agreed, I also think that ...
  
  Google may have made a mistake by buying this company. Unless they have planned to Open Source the codec. It is my belief that if they don't open source the codec that they will be in such a strong, dominant, position regarding control of the WWW/Internet ( they are building their own, aren't they/) that they will be easily able to suppress any technology or competing software very easily.
  
  Smiley face because I think Google will open source this.
  
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Monday 22nd February 2010 10:16 GMT Anonymous Coward

DIRAC - best open source video codec...

So much discussion about Flash, Theora etc. yet so far no-one has mentioned the premium open-source video codec - DIRAC, the highly scalable system developed by the foremost broadcaster in the world - the BBC. They are very supportive of open source, use Linux extensively and since it is public money that enables the thousands of man-hours to make all this possible, decided to make this professional-grade codec available to anyone. It scales automatically from low-speed network connections right up to super high definition channels.

If it is good enough to be setting broadcasting-industry standards it should be good enough for You-tube !

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Monday 22nd February 2010 10:18 GMT kevin king

Theora is nothing but small web video

Theora does have a major architectural problems with regards any encoding with HD video in that the max motion vector length is only 16 pixels. In non-technical terms, that means that the codec can only track MOBS (motion of objects) between two sequential frames of less than 16 pixels. At low resolutions, this isn't a problem, but at highresolutions, it just doesn't work....one of the reasons it never be good in HD

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1. Monday 22nd February 2010 11:15 GMT MacroRodent
  
  re: Theora is nothing but small web video
  
  Interesting info, but isn' t that maximum length just a parameter that could easily be tweaked? Might require a new version of the bitstream ("Theora V2") , but not a fundamental re-write.
  
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Monday 22nd February 2010 10:57 GMT blackworx

Keep Getting Pushed for a Title

"...or aggressively invite users to upgrade their browsers..."

I can see it now... If they did that, Google would naturally push Chrome and nothing else. Then we would have everyone and their dog complaining about Google abusing a dominant market position. Deja vu much?

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Monday 22nd February 2010 11:41 GMT George Gardiner 1

Transcoding all that video...

VP8 is not a fast codec. It would take several years to transcode all the existing YouTube content into VP8. One wonders how YouPorn and other smaller outfits would cope, and weather the introduction of a new codec is just going to introduce a new set of frustrations for both users and content owners. At least when we went from h.263 (or rather, Soroson Spark - a simplified version of it) to h.264, the delivary was all through the same player (Flash).

Also, the only reason that HTML5 YouTube was done in h.264 exclusively is because there was simply no chance of transcoding much of anything into ogg/theora in the time and there was already a lot of h.264 encoded video intended for Flash.

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1. Monday 22nd February 2010 12:16 GMT James Hughes 1
  
  Title!
  
  But has anyone said that as soon as HTML5 is used, flash support will cease?
  
  YouTube would have to run in parallel until all streams were converted. Some smaller outfits wouldn't even need to change - just stay with Flash. Once the whole world is HTML5 capable, then change.
  
  Not sure how long it would take to transcode all of youtube, but Google has a LOT of machines that could be doing it in their spare cpu cycles. BOINC anyone?
  
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Monday 22nd February 2010 12:13 GMT Daniel 1

They'll open it

Google's not in the business of owning codecs: it's in the business of getting every producer of video content on the Internet to use a format Google can index. This means metadata, and at the moment there are too many de facto, standards creeping into how meta data gets its way into video files. Ogg is a fairly typical example of this.

Google isn't against de facto standards, it just like them to be THEIR de facto standards. Opening up On2 would allow it to steer the addition of meta data in ways that suit the Googlebot, and people would go along with that, if they knew that that's how to give a video a good page rank.

Books, video, XML feeds - it doesn't matter: Google doesn't want to own the content, and it most certainly doesn't want to control the content. it wants to own the fact that you or I are interested in the content.

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Monday 22nd February 2010 12:46 GMT Tom Chiverton 1

Umm

"Google could offer a free VP8-enabled plug-in "

So, the FSF wants to swap one free plugin for another free plugin ? This helps how ?

HTML5 video is *dead* until the top browsers all support a single codec. Even then, transcoding all of YouTube is unlikely to happen.

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Monday 22nd February 2010 13:34 GMT paul 97

"You owe it to the public and to the medium that made you successful to solve this problem..."

Google made all their own software and didn't use a single piece of existing open source software to help create their empire.

I agree the tone of the letter is a bit questionable - but google did get help~

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1. Monday 22nd February 2010 15:59 GMT Sean Timarco Baggaley
  
  Oh please.
  
  Google have also given plenty of code *back* to the community, as specified in the conditions of the GPL (etc.) licenses. What the f*ck more do you want? Money?
  
  Either you're giving your code away and letting others use it on the conditions you have set out, or you're not. Which is it?
  
  If you were grocery shop, would you constantly remind me how you're saving me from starvation by *selling* me groceries? "Morning Mr. B! Still not dead of hunger, I see! How about giving me some money to keep my shop going! After all, I sold you some apples yesterday, so you had something to eat and didn't die! Oh! Leaving so soon? YOU EVIL MAN!"
  
  Get it now? If you didn't want to give your bloody code away, why did you slap a GPL license on it and claim it was "free"?
  
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2. Tuesday 23rd February 2010 10:45 GMT MacroRodent
  
  Google *USES* open-source software
  
  "Google made all their own software and didn't use a single piece of existing open source software to help create their empire."
  
  Not so! Google servers famously run Linux, which they could customize to better serve their empire, and using it also saves them from paying OS license fees based on their humongous CPU count...
  
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Monday 22nd February 2010 13:35 GMT Pantera

that's really

really scary

to be honest i don't care if a codec is open or closed source, at least not as much as if it works well. MS , google apple are all companies, the difference is that ms and apple are more interested in how much money the can make me pay and that google is interested in my private information

i can control how much money i spend but less and less how private my privacy is

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Monday 22nd February 2010 20:14 GMT Trevor Pott o_O

VP8

Give a free, perpetual licence to any browser manufacturer, set it as the HTML5 standard, with an open commitment that anyone who comes along and wants to build a new browser can have a free, perpetual licence.

Charge for use of the codec in anything else, such as stand-alone media players, games, etc.

HTML5 problem solved, and ability to recoup your investment retained.

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