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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this position. Dropping H.264 is aligned with the FSF's goals, so of course they should support it.

To me, Google's move is an indication that Google will eventually drop and/or downgrade Flash support.

You encourage institutions to do the right thing by applauding when they do the right thing. Not by saying "you suck because you didn't take it far enough". You say "Good move doing X. And when you do Y you'll be doubly awesome."

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This is going to sound somewhat trollish, unfortunately, but it's difficult for me to resolve the sheer cognitive dissonance in these complaints with anything other than either fanboyism or myopia.

Google may eventually stop bundling Adobe Flash if it becomes obsolete, but there is no reason to do it out of spite. Plugins are a part of the web and are in line with Google's culture of extensibility. See also vendor modifications to Android OS. If anything Google will open up plugin autoupdates to more plugin vendors.

Google may eventually drop Adobe Flash if it becomes obsolete, but there is no reason to do it out of spite. Plugins are a part of the web and are in line with Google's culture of extensibility. See also vendor modifications to Android OS. If anything Google will open up plugin autoupdates to more plugin vendors.

I fail to see how this move is good for end users.

By any chance, did you read the actual article?

Yes I did. Did you?

Of course. I'll even quote the article:

> H.264 is a patent-encumbered codec; the MPEG LA organization requires developers who implement it to agree to a patent license. This license is fundamentally incompatible with software freedom. It requires developers to restrict how their software can be used, and to collect royalties in many situations.

While the wording is not perfect, this is actually about end user freedoms and convenience. There's the same situation is with parts of ffmpeg/libavformat or libmad - you just can't ship and use them completely legally. This is why "restricted formats" notion appeared, and why Ubuntu started shipping Fluendo's non-free encoder binary (http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/fluendo-mp3-decoder/, previous-to-last paragraph).

It was always a problem (albeit, nowadays, minor one) to use proprietary codecs on GNU/Linux systems. Problem not on developers' side, but the for the actual end users. Killing H.264, thus actively encouraging WebM support helps WebM to win the formats battle. In a short term, both end users and developers will experience compatibility problems, but in the end - if WebM will win - both end users and developers will benefit.

And please remember that we have Firefox, which - due to various FLOSS reasons - just won't support H.264 anyway.

The FSF has always been about the long term. This move is actually much less short-term user-hostile than many of their other moves.

I don't have the problem with FSF's long term. I have a huge problem with their vision of that long term. It looks miopic, if you ask me.

In long term, H.264 patent will expire.

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