As to Gruber: he has no credibility asking Google tough questions.
Why do you need credibility to ask questions?
Why do you need credibility to ask questions?
Discourse, like everything social, requires a certain amount of good faith, or it stops being useful.
I can understand Google wanting to push open standards, but there are some very glaring hypocrisies on display here. Everyone questions Apple's agenda when they leave Flash out of iOS, but somehow Google gets a pass?
Gruber is biased? Heh.
One is not like the other. Apple didn't let other people provide Flash support for iOS. Google is merely choosing not to support something internally. No one expected Apple to write a Flash plugin and officially support it.
As for hypocrisy...
> Chrome currently bundles an embedded version of Adobe’s closed source and proprietary Flash Player plugin.
And I'm sure if Google had to implement Flash, they wouldn't.
> Android currently supports H.264. Will this support be removed from Android? If not, why not?
Different environments. The web is based on open standards. It's like asking why Android is written in C instead of HTML5 and JS.
He then goes on to ask other stupid questions equally baseless.
Essentially, he's demanding that Apple support Flash by building their own Flash player for their devices.
> Who is happy about this?
Anyone who cares about open standards and protocols.
> What part of his line of questions would you deem "obviously inappropriate" or lacking "good faith"?
Listen, I'm not anti-Gruber. I read his stuff and take it for what it's worth. But it's fairly clear his line of questioning isn't genuine. They are constructed to make a point: that a vendor should be required to support plugins even if they don't want to, except for Apple of course.
Are you implying that Gruber isn't biased? It's really neither here nor there, but I've been on HN enough to simply see the headlines with (daringfireball) next to it to roll my eyes at that notion.
(Note, I think John brings up some great questions. I think almost all the complaints about WebM, voiced here on HN, are ignorant of browser compatibility and Flash's support for WebM (though I still think the hardware decoding points that have been brought up are very valid), but the questions of timing and consistency across Google's product intrigue me)
The OP accused Gruber of having an inappropriate agenda and not acting in good faith. I didn't read that between the lines in Gruber's post, so I'm curious why he/she did.
Hating Google is pretty low on my todo list.
With your logic, why should I pay money for content? So far, it seems to be impossible to prevent ripping and transcoding, so maybe the answer would be "you shouldn't".
And yet, we have volunteers with knowledge who are constrained by patents (I'm sure x264 guys could come up with an awesome codec, and Theora team could do much better if they weren't limited to technology they got patents for),
And we have companies willing to support development of codecs (BBC Dirac, Google) which, again, are constrained by patents.
See this highly informative and empowering video: http://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml
If you read the EULAs and such on even a piece of 'professional' software like Final Cut Studio or Avid, it'll describe how the encoder is only licensed for personal use and that someone else in your distribution chain needs a different contractual arrangement with them, along with whoever's on the playback end.
I can't seem to find it, but there was once a comment or page by PG which explained the core of good follow-up comments: not picking out a single item which is easy to criticise, but rather responding to the core of the parent comment.
If not, why not?