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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, I think Adobe has two paths in front of it:

1) Resolve the licensing issue and transfer ownership of the Flash player code to the community, and do that quickly. This, with plenty of cooperation with the community, could mean that Flash development is taken over by the community, and it may even be integrated into HTML5 in some way.

2) Rebuild their culture to be competitive. Reported, documented, reproducible crash bugs hanging around for years are inexcusable, for any reason. The main reason I see for this is their slow culture that allows long release cycle and a "we'll fix it in the next release" attitude.

I suspect the second one is far harder to fix, so my recommendation would be for the first one.

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What do you mean by "Resolve the licensing issue"? They don't own H.264, how do you want them to "resolve" something they don't own?

I assume they could keep the part that decode H.264 closed source, or other creative solution.

or use ogg ?

Problems can always be resolved.

Some things are truly impossible (change the taste of the colour purple), some are technically impossible (fly by flapping your wings), and some are just impossible due to disagreements between people (release an open-source implementation of a closed codec).

If you can resolve the first, you're God. If you can resolve the second, you're a technological visionary. If you can resolve the third, you're a good politician. Only the first category can be really considered impossible to achieve. Resolving licensing issues with H.264 is hardly impossible in that respect.

What do you _mean_ by "resolving"? You want adobe to buy H.264 and give it away for free? That's pretty much impossible.

You can't just throw around the word "resolve" things without understanding the complexity or nature of the possible solutions.

I mean "do 'stuff' that makes the problem 'go away'".

As a former management consultant, and now a start-up founder, believe me, I speak from experience when I say every problem of this kind is solvable if you want to do it badly enough.

There is only "one stuff" they can do to make the problem go away (in your words "resolving licensing issues"), which is, they can buy H.264 and give it away for free (open source it), which is impossible without making themselves bankrupt.

The other stuff that I can think of is that they can use Ogg Theora, which is hardly a solution, considering (IMO) it is an inferior codec.

"There is only one way to do X" = the way narrow-minded, uncreative people see the world.

they can buy H.264 and give it away for free (open source it), which is impossible without making themselves bankrupt.

As the discussion around H.264/Theora etc has heated up I've started wondering about this. There are now at least 3 rather large players with relatively deep pockets that all have licensed h.264 for products they essentially give away. So what if Google, Apple, and Adobe all pooled together and purchased the patents for h.264 and licensed it for free (or possibly a free non-commercial license, and force any other big players using it to chip in). I wonder what the price tag on that would be.

I can't believe this number is correct, but one of the Xiph guys claimed that the MPEG 2 patents (i.e. DVDs), which are all still in force and built on top of for MPEG-4 part2 and part 10 (i.e H.264) took in $67 dollars for every person on the planet in 2008.

That's half a trillion dollars in a year, and that's not even counting revenue they get from MPEG-4 or the audio codecs.

What's with the group downvotes, folks?

I stopped responding to this guy because his points are worthless. I'd rather the space on this page was used up by intelligent discussion rather than needless debate over a concept that is obvious to anyone who actually does any kind of ambiguous, difficult work (e.g. running a start-up, being a consultant, and generally being anything more than an employee who takes orders).

Please don't force me to waste space and energy arguing this stupid point.

It doesn't surprise me you were a management consultant. You're getting downvotes for repeating simplistic abstracts, without suggesting anything close to a reasonable course of action.

"How do we fix this problem?" "Well, all problems can be fixed by fixing the problem." "Ok, so how do we do that?" "Simple, fix the problem." "Right."

Ultimately, every solution I propose will have issues. This is why I did not outline a specific solution. Because they're all stupid until one of them becomes the right one because of specific circumstances, people, etc. That is the nature of difficult problem-solving. If it was easy, people like you might be able to do it.

Here are a few possible solutions, though, off the top of my head right now - I'm sure someone closer to the problem could find more, better potential solutions:

1) Release the player code without the codecs.

2) Obtain a special license from the people that own H.264 to be allowed to release the source code.

3) Get some kind of agreement that the owners of H.264 won't sue Adobe and release the source code.

4) Do so without getting the agreement - maybe they won't sue.

5) Transmit ownership of the code to a different legal entity and release the code via that entity.

6) Slowly migrate to a new codec that can be released (e.g. Ogg).

7) Release the code with Ogg support without the H.264 part.

8) Buy the code patent.

9) Start a public relations campaign to convince the owners to open up H.264 for everyone.

10) Start a public relations campaign to convince the courts to overturn H.264 (say, on grounds that it harms the public good).

That's just off the top of my head. Yes, they all have problems, but they're all starting points - and there's no evidence that Adobe explored any of those or any others. If you can't think of twice as many potential solutions, your brain is effectively the size of a pea when it comes to creative problem-solving.

And if "management-speak" language stops you from understanding a good point, you're a fucking retard.

Downvote away.

It's amazing this discussion took that long to enumerate those simple possible, not all of them viable, solutions.

Of them all, #1 (the "plug your codec here") is the easiest. h.264 is not even protected in the whole world, so, those who can will enjoy it and those who don't will, perhaps, lobby their representatives.

#6 is also nice because with sufficient funding, Ogg can become a decent option and everyone would benefit.

Yup, george_morgan is right, you were being downvoted for using abstract corporate language to solve real problems. In a forum like this, most of us have heard it before: "We'll resolve this by applying creativity and resourcefulness." "But how exactly?" "We're going to give it our all, and it will work out!" As engineers, we're the ones who actually do the resolving, and we like to apply concrete, tenable options to problems.

They could just wait 18 years - that's one feasible option. I'd suppose it wouldn't benefit them greatly though.

It always annoys me when people talk about "stuff" without thinking for a moment what the "stuff" actually is.

What do you mean by "they don't own H.264"? What does "H.264" mean in your sentence? H.264 is a standard that defines how to decode an elementary video stream. You can't "own it". You can own rights to an implementation — but that's where things get interesting.

There are many H.264 decoders, some of which are open source and could be used by Adobe. So their argument is rather weak.

"You can't "own it"."

Well sure you can... you can patent it. In that case, making use of even an F/OSS implementation (such as x264) doesn't guarantee that you have not infringed upon MPEG LA's patents (where they are applicable/enforced).

Presumably they are already paying for H.264 in flash anyway; why would they stop after open sourcing it?

Hang on, rebuild their culture to be competitive? Whatever the merits of Flash, it competes in the open market with HTML 5, SVG, Silverlight, Java [FX], you name it. Having somebody decide for you what you can and you can't run on your own device seems a lot more anti-competitive.

Flash has tremendous market penetration and is in very wide use. On the strength of that, I don't think Adobe's choices are constrained just to what bloggers, HN posters or even Steve Jobs say.

I'm not a great fan myself (other than when sinking hours into the latest Tower Defense game), FlashBlock is among the first things I download on a fresh install of Firefox but the notion that Flash is somehow teetering on the precipice of oblivion is fanciful, to put it very mildly.

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