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Comment by mcpherrinm | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy this argument at all.

If I have to pay royalty fees to ship an h.264 decoder, that's not open. If I have to pay royalty fees for my startup to distribute videos in h.264, that's not open.

Standardized doesn't mean "open".

[Edit: I think several people in this thread disagree what Open means. Since this is the context of a Mozilla story, I think it is fair to use "Open" in the sense of "Open Source".]

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Open != free. H.264 is an open standard, in that the specification is open, and you can implement your own encoder/decoder as you wish. H.264 is not a free standard is due to the fact that you cannot implement anything useful without using some patented technologies.

WebM is free. Good luck implementing your own encoder/decoder.

People tend to define open however it benefits them. It's not really worth feeding the trolls.

Trolls - patent trolls - are sort of the central concern here, aren't they?

No, the companies that designed H.264 aren't really trolls. They actually do R&D and sell real products; patent royalties are relatively minor sources of revenue.

The CEO of MPEG LA is also the CEO of a patent troll company called MobileMedia.

MPEG LA had no hand in designing h.264, it's solely a patent pool manager.

That doesn't matter though, even if they aren't today they easily could be tomorrow, whether through a change in their management, being purchased by another, etc.

By many definitions of "open standard" H.264 isn't one, since many groups tried to brand that term in echo of "open source" to mean royalty-free (and therefore open source compatible). That definition seemed to generally be catching on until this web codec spat flared up with both sides wanting the cachet of being "open standards" rather than debating the actual policy implications of being royalty-bearing.

And factually there's several independent WebM implementations now, some would argue that it's easier to be compatible with an open source codebase than a spec, though having (at least) two independant codebases developed before finalizing is better for finding spec bugs.

> Standardized doesn't mean "open".

Nor does "open" mean "free".

Most of the Mozilla people, whom I otherwise quite respect, didn't like to admit that you're also almost certain to end up needing to pay royalties to ship any other decoder as well. The difference is that if you use H.264 your startup can know exactly what the costs will be whereas using WebM means you're just going to have to wait until you make enough money for someone to sue you.

The Mozilla people wasted a ton of energy conflating WebM with open-ness rather than directing attention to the actually problem: current patent law. As long as someone else can show up and demand money for independent work the environment will predisposed against complete openness.

Why is this a problem for Mozilla but not a problem for VLC?

I've found the VLC firefox plugin more stable than flash, downsides being it doesn't always get detected by javascript feature tests and UI integration isn't the greatest.

VideoLan does not have a presence in the USA, Mozilla does

it boils down to software patents.

Some people claim the situation of H.264 patents in Europe isn't that clear, though. VLC might be just benefiting from a lack of initiative from patent holders.

VLC have no money, so there's little incentive for H.264 patent holders to pursue them. Given that fact, the game theory suggests it is in the H.264 patent holders ultimate interests to allow VLC to be distributed far and wide. That provides an avenue for further penetration of H.264, which may create additional opportunities where royalties can be sought.

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