Appropriately following our explainer on why HTML5 won’t save the internet (yet) and the embedded discussion about video codecs and the future of internet video, MPEG LA – who licenses the H.264 codec – has announced they’re going to continue H.264′s royalty freeness for free internet video through 2016.
Which sounds like it melts some of Mozilla’s core objections to anointing H.264 the internet video standard, but don’t bet on it. They’re pretty committed to a fully free and open standard. Just see Mozilla engineering VP’s longer post on the subject. What, you thought things would actually get resolved anytime soon? [MPEG LA via Daring Fireball]
Josh Stewart
Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 3:02 PMIts all well and good to say this removes some of Mozilla’s objections, but you don’t say anything about how they are supposed to actually implement this and remain an open source project at the same time.
The fact is that whilst you can buy a license from MPEG LA to use h.264 in your browser, you are not allowed to then release that implementation under the GPL (or similar free software licenses). Chrome gets around this by including the codec within the binary version, but leaving it out in the open Chromium source.
Once MPEG LA agree to allow open source implementations, then you might have an expectation for Mozilla to change their stance.
ThePengwin
Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 5:33 PMThis sounds a bit shifty… until 2017? then what?
Its like “hey guys, until we know you cant survive without it, its free, but then we will have to see”.
Mozilla probably wont bite, and i don’t blame them.