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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

Anything – especially if created in the open – will always be inferior in the beginning. That’s just how it is and not the least bit surprising. Gruber makes the argument that open things which made it were – at the point were they started to gain traction – as good or better than the closed alternatives.

Consumers and companies will use open technologies if there are no (cheap, available, fitting) closed alternatives or if the open stuff is as good or better than the closed stuff. They won’t use open technologies just for openness sake. That’s the gist of the argument.

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As the parent said, e.g. MySQL and Linux weren't as good or better than the closed alternatives when they gained traction. They were however cheaper, and open often has the quality of cheaper, since it's often simply free. Cheaper often wins over better. Hell, MySQL still isn't as good at the big closed databases.

And this applies to HTML5 video: Theora is cheaper than h264. So Gruber's argument doesn't seem to hold.

You are defining "good" as "feature rich", which are different concepts.

For example, MySQL wasn't and isn't as feature rich as the big closed databases, but it solved many problems as well as they did, and in many cases with less overhead (learning curve, administration, hardware requirements). So, in a way it was better than the alternatives, and that's why it gained traction.

Compare to H.264 vs. Theora. Theora is just an alternative, it doesn't solve any problems better, it is just "open", which most people don't care about.

> MySQL and Linux weren't as good or better than the closed alternatives when they gained traction

I don't recall either gaining any traction until they were better in some way, either for developers or implementors. In some cases just being "open" makes it better, but that's only true if the project is going to be adopted in some way, like Apple using KHTML for WebKit.

In the case of Theora, nobody wants to adopt it as a long term project, they just want to implement video for their users. From that perspective, H.264 is better (I'm a layman here, but as I understand it the quality is better and the file sizes are significantly smaller, but correct me if I'm wrong).

It would certainly be better if they all got together on Theora much like they have on WebKit, but it seems ongoing development can't have the same level of improvement on a video codec that it can on a rendering engine, at least that's my perspective on it.

It depends on where you define traction to have occurred. In the classic "crossing the chasm" terminology. A "good enough" solution that is open can attract early adopters and these same early adopters can become evangelists, developers who improve the open product, or developers who use the open product to create additional products (and sometimes show others how they did this in a devel/evangelism hybrid.) The improvements in awareness, product quality, and product ecosystem that come from all three of those variants of the early adopter are what gets the product into the mainstream and it is usually not until progress has been made on all three fronts that anyone claims that a product is "getting traction."

The lack of an alternative choice will push a lot of people into the early adopter space for some product niches, which can lead to a fast elevator ride into mainstream usage for some products (c.f. MySQL, Linux, etc.) This is not the case with video codecs. The field is technically rigorous so only a few have the chops to contribute code, the alternatives (h.264) are currently better and widely available so few have much to gain by building the Theora ecosystem, which really only leaves the evangelists who are interested in the product as a mission rather than as a tool. This group is unlikely to gain significant traction with the mainstream computing audience.

> I don't recall either gaining any traction until they were better in some way, either for developers or implementors.

No, when they got traction was before they were better, but after they were good enough, which means you could run your business on cheap Intel/AMD hardware.

Ah, but that means they were better in some way relevant to business needs, and good enough elsewhere.

Theora is better in terms of cost, but that apparently isn't enough of an advantage to counter the technical shortcomings.

No, they were not better than the closed source alternatives for most businesses. They were cheaper. Cheaper trumps better often. Cheaper drove adoption.

I'm defining "cheaper" as one of many factors that go into deciding if one thing is better than another, I'm not speaking purely from a technical/feature standpoint.

Theora is cheaper in some cases, but usually all codecs appear "free". Apple and MS have already paid the H.264 license fees (for other reasons), so the incremental cost to support it in the browser is zero. Likewise, most people treat encoding and streaming as free even if they're legally supposed to pay.

MySQL would never have caught on if every new computer made came with an already licensed version of a better and faster database. MySQL was "better" because it was accessible. h.264 is already accessible, it's built into every new smartphone and computer.

Gruber ignores costs, that’s right. Probably should have mentioned those somewhere in his argument.

But, just so to make that clear, cost does of course not win by default. If something is bad enough, paying for the alternative could be the better thing to do.

Gruber ignoring cost when it's often one of the strongest benefits that fall out of openness strikes me as disingenuous.

And yeah, cheap doesn't always win if it really sucks. You could make an argument that Theora sucks that bad, especially when you consider the lack of hardware decoders. But that isn't Gruber's argument at all. His analysis here is really off base.

Price is just another criteria used to evaluate what's "good", but it is not an independent factor. The importance of price varies along with everything else.

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