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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

1. I'm not going to argue about Apple's defaults here. It simply isn't germane when the college board has full control over the inputs and iPhones will make up a significant portion of test takers.

2. I think you don't understand what the College Board is. It's a single organization that administers test. This isn't something each university needs to deal with. They make and administer the test to all college-bound students in the US each year.

3. There are plenty of existing open source decoders, and all major open source graphics programs already accept the format (GraphicConverter, ImageMagick, GIMP), in addition to all the major OSes (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android).

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2. In the specific case of the College Board, yes. Keep in mind that maybe the license fee is based on number of institutions and every student would end up indirectly paying for the license.

But also think about independent educational institutions (primary, secondary, higher, etc), think about all schools and colleges in other countries (we're all in a similar situation). All of them would have to find a way to license HEIC, just because Apple decided that they wanted HEIC as their default format.

3. I'd guess that companies that implement HEIC pay for their license.

The legal situation of using open source programs to decode licensed and patent encumbered formats is uncertain to me, and I guess it is to most people, including software engineers and managers.

No other entity other than The College Board receives the raw test. Everyone else only receives the results. The College Board also charges around $100 for each of these tests, so even if they had to support the format (they don’t) they really should easily be able to do so.

Note that many students take many of these tests, even dozens, so $100/test is quite a lot for what is usually a few hours sit down in a big room with a handful of proctors for hundreds of students (i.e., no more expensive to run than a typical university intro-level class final with a professor and some student TAs).

The whole issue is easily circumvented by correctly setting the accepted inputs, which is clearly the responsibility of the webpage owners. Next time, someone uploads JPEG2000 and runs into the same problem. I guess then it’s again someone else who gets the blame?

The license fee is based on the number of devices performing the conversion; each institution gets a number free; it's less than a few dollars per device.

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