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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Here's Monty's "we lost" announcement:

http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/61927.html

Which goes into some of the details of the fight for a free web.

I sure hope he's wrong. Personally, I think a patent-encumbered MTI codec for WebRTC would be a very bad, especially for the open source community:

- You can't have a spec-compliant implementation of WebRTC by compiling and running Firefox yourself. You need to download extra binaries from Cisco.

- You can't have a spec-compliant implementation of WebRTC in your Linux distro, without including binaries from Cisco.

- You can't write an Android app that uses the library from webrtc.org to interop with WebRTC in the browsers without downloading binaries from Cisco (unless you pay the MPEG-LA).

- You can't write an iOS app to interop with WebRTC in the browsers, at all, because you can't download binaries from Cisco (unless you pay the MPEG-LA).

- You can't build open source projects that fully interop with WebRTC, without dancing around all the lingering patent issues.

In all these situations, having h264 as the MTI is worse than having no MTI at all.

You can't write an Android app ... You can't write an iOS app...

Realistically, don't phones provide already-licensed hardware codecs?

They do. That's an advantage that H.264 has over the alternatives: it is ubiquitous on phones and tablets.

because the phone browser is "sold" to you. When you buy a phone, even if you are going to wipe out the OS and install something else, you already paid hundreds of dollars on licensing. Heck microsoft quarter only had a profit because of license fees on android.

It is the microsoft taxes on PC all over again. Only this time MPEGLA learned the lesson from MP3 and got their licensing claws sharpened.

I mean it as "a practical advantage regarding user reach", not a technical or economical advantage.

I agree with you that patent encumbered technologies don't have their place in open standards. The current situation sucks.

Phones (and virtually any other electronic product) contain dozens of licensed technologies including ARM, Wi-Fi, 3G/4G, etc. Do you object to those as well, or just codecs?

One step at a time. Fight for open codecs today, and maybe 50 years from now we'll reach a 100% open stack, from hardware to software and wireless protocols, that provides a free baseline available for implementation by any company or individual without royalties.

To all licenses i will not use mostly.

where i came from it is forbidden to sell one product and force you on another. Like you can't buy a car and be forced to only use gas from one brand. Likewise i still feel it is wrong to sell a hardware and force you on a certain software.

A patent license is not a product. A patent license is a permission to use a technology used in the product you buy.

Hundreds of dollars on licensing?

only company that mentioned the royalties they pay microsoft was HTC and they are paying $5. and HTC is a very close partner to microsoft. others probably pay more.

And microsoft licenses are only bulling, it is not even useful. So i'm guessing it would get close to $100 per device.

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