Ian Hickson wrote:
On Thu, 29 Mar 2007, Gervase Markham wrote:
Dave Singer wrote:
No, writing it into the HTML specification is not a commercial reason.
Assuming you have commercial reasons for supporting HTML 5 (which I
suspect you do, otherwise you wouldn't be here) then having Ogg
specified gives you a commercial reason to support it.
If that's not a commercial reason, then what would be a commercial
reason? If everyone else implemented it?
A _commercial_ reason would be "our customers demand it". Customers in
this case would be users, and users would demand it if a big video site
started using Ogg Theora.
Which they will only do if browsers support it. Chicken and egg. So this
again boils down to my characterisation of Apple's position as "if
everyone else supports it, we will". Which seems a lot more like "free
formats only if unavoidable" rather than "we have a strong commitment to
interoperability".
I look forward to hearing Dave's suggestion for how we promote
interoperability among <video> implementations.
Why don't we all just go away and implement what we think is best for
HTML 5, and then put a spec together after the fact? Then we wouldn't be
forcing any issues, and there would be no "fiat". But we all know how
well this approach to standards works.
Actually that's pretty much exactly what we're doing with HTML5.
HTML 5 seems to be a mixture of the two approaches. For pragmatic
reasons we are (holding our noses, in some cases) standardising existing
things, often because of the market dominance of the existing
implementation. But in many other cases, we are speccing things first,
trying them out and then updating based on feedback. Which I would say
is the right approach.
No matter what the spec. says, if broad support became a reality, then
yes, it may be in our commercial interests.
So Apple's strategy is to wait and see what codec everyone else
implements, and then implement that one?
Everyone's strategy should be to implement what they need to implement.
Implementing random stuff without good reason ends up simply bloating your
product.
Straw man. That's not what I said. Apple's "if broad support became a
reality, then yes, it may be in our commercial interests" seems to
translate pretty safely to "if everyone else supports it, we will". If
not, how are they different?
anyone *can* implement the codecs we implement; they may choose not
to, for commercial reasons (e.g. they don't like the license)
Oh c'mon, that's a ridiculous definition of the word "can". How exactly
"can" the KDE project implement a codec in Konqueror which requires
royalties? How "can" the Mozilla project implement such a codec without
removing the redistributability of Firefox?
In both cases, by negotiating appropriate licenses with the IP owners.
Given than giving an appropriate license compatible with free software
would basically mean the IP owners saying "yes, we are happy to get no
more revenue from this, ever", I consider that somewhat unlikely, and
not really falling within a definition of "can". But perhaps you know
different. Is Google planning to buy out the MPEG patent portfolio and
put it under a royalty-free license? That would be a wonderful
contribution to interoperable video standards.
Gerv
(Again, as in this entire thread, speaking only for myself.)
