Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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> that's what collaboration is for

"Collaboration" is a poor model for hard R&D. Some problem domains, like video coding, require PhDs with extensive domain knowledge. These folks don't work for free. Community projects don't have the resources to pay for systematic, concerted research efforts in these areas.

Which is why entities like MPEG-LA exist in the first place. If collaborative projects had developed these technologies first, the companies behind MPEG-LA never would've gotten their patents.

> Instead, some like MPEG-LA are doing concerted effort to extort money and prevent competing technologies from emerging.

Note that the key competitors to the patented MPEG technology is coming from "benevolent monopolies" like Google. Those alternatives are unsustainable without those sponsors. So in reality, "open collaboration" is not one of the options. It's a choice between R&D bankrolled by patents, or R&D bankrolled by Google's search profits or Facebook's social media profits.

> Note that the key competitors to the patented MPEG technology is coming from "benevolent monopolies" like Google.

That may be true in the abstract or in the case of MPEG's multimedia technologies. It is not true in this specific case of genomic file formats.

The existing formats in use in the field (BAM and CRAM) that MPEG-G is looking to supplant come from the genomics community itself. They have come about in the course of bioinformaticians' work analysing sequencing data or as bioinformatics research [1]. Thus this R&D has primarily been bankrolled as scientific research; the funding comes from scientific charities or other scientific research funding.

That is to say, it has come from collaboration.

[1] CRAM originates from "Efficient storage of high throughput DNA sequencing data using reference-based compression", published in Genome Research in 2011. <https://genome.cshlp.org/content/21/5/734.long>

The work behind that article was done at the European Molecular Biology Lab ("EMBL"), which is a government-supported research lab. I wouldn't call that "collaboration" --it's one of the three forms of R&D spending I mentioned above ("government as benevolent monopoly").

These are my made up definitions of course, so we can argue about what counts as "collaboration." I'd say something like W3C or Linux--companies and individuals working together who aren't bankrolled by either patents, the government, or a quasi-monopoly.

> I wouldn't call that "collaboration" --it's one of the three forms of R&D spending I mentioned above ("government as benevolent monopoly").

The difference between government funding and a 'benevolent monopoly' is that in the first case an entity that does not directly benefit financially is providing the funding, while in the second case the entity providing the funding has a financial incentive to do so.

And that's ignoring the fact that they listed the government as one source of funding, the link provided being an example of what they are talking about, not the sole instance. At least according to their comment, some funding for such things also comes from 'scientific charities'.

One core part of CRAM originated with that article; more has come later.

I'm involved in BAM and CRAM -- it feels like a collaboration to me!

These formats are a collaboration between bioinformaticians at a number of research institutes and companies around the world, with various charity, governmental, or other funding. They are maintained under the auspices of GA4GH, which is indeed something like W3C.

Firstly, GA4GH has commercial members as well as academics, and all collaborate together to produce file formats, standards and protocols.

Secondly you missed out a key part of funding - precompetitive alliances. Eg see the Pistoia Alliance (https://www.pistoiaalliance.org/) who funded the SequenceSqueeze project into compression of FASTQ (http://www.sequencesqueeze.org/).

The notion here is simple - there are some technologies that are so core they cross all the commercial and academic boundaries. Collaboration rather than competition is considered to be to the mutual benefit of everyone involved. It is this mind set which lead to the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), who are also in direct competitive with MPEG.

> These folks don't work for free.

Collaboration doesn't mean they work for free. It means many pool resources to solve the same problem, instead of everyone trying to reinvent the wheel and then charging everyone else for it. That's what AOM are doing, which disproves your claims in practice.

> Which is why entities like MPEG-LA exist in the first place.

Nope, they exist because of the messed up legal patent situation, which allows such parasitic entities to engage in patent protection racket which is the opposite of progress. Patent law needs serious reform to prevent such kind of abuse.

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