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Comment by gxti | Hacker News Reader

They're not sitting around a conference table in an underground bunker, stroking their beards and cackling maniacally while trying to screw the open source community as hard as possible. Microsoft is a business. What business sense does it make to release this plugin?

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As a member of the H.264 patent pool[1], Microsoft makes money when people use H.264. If WebM becomes popular, Microsoft directly makes less money.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA

Don't they also have to pay licensing fees to MPEG-LA? What's the overall impact on the bottom line? IMO it would have to be pretty substantial for it to really be a driving factor in the decision-making.

I'm fairly sure they pay more than they receive in this particular case.

I doubt they pay more for their use of H.264 than they receive from everyone's use of H.264. Providing the codec may cost them money, but it's far from obvious that it's an unprofitable act.

If everyone in the patent pool is making money of H264, who is paying that money?

What big player that sells H264 is not on the list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA#H.264.2FMPEG-4_AVC_Lice...?

Also, MPEG-LA does have costs to pay.

I guess that, for most of the companies on that list, it is a 'pay a bit to prevent legal troubles' scenario, where 'a bit' is a couple of millions. Some of that they will get back when MPEG-LA gets disbanded.

Just thinking out loud, but if this codec becomes dominant, and is only released by Microsoft on the Windows platform, perhaps it's another reason to prefer Windows over OSX?

Apple adopted H.264 years ago -- it's basically all they use.

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