>Third, MPEG LA has not thrown us a bone. Cisco != MPEG LA.
Oh please, Cisco is part of MPEG LA and you'd have to be incredibly naive to believe that this was Cisco striking it out on their own to offer a 'solution'. This is MPEG LA's offering, brought to you by one of it's members.
And likewise it doesn't take a genious to realize that you switching sides one week before the vote came as a result of discussion with Cisco, to offer broader support for h264 as the WebRTC standard.
So yes, I say you sold out.
>Fourth, MPEG LA was not terrified of HTML5 standardizing on a truly RF codec, because HTML5 was never going to do any such thing.
Oh I'm sure this royalty free h264 binary blob offering from MPEG LA was due to the kindness of their hearts.
Of course they were terrified, because even if this was just for WebRTC and not HTML5, it would have set a precedent for a fully open source and royalty free codec, with all the benefits that come along with it, which in turn would increase demands for fully open web video solutions in all areas.
Also you totally avoided the question I posed regarding your 'hardware support' argument, and where that leaves Dalaa as anything more than a toy project.
I held you guys to much too high standards it seems (much higher than any others in the web industry), I was obviously wrong.
> Oh I'm sure this royalty free h264 binary blob offering from MPEG LA was due to the kindness of their hearts.
That's not from MPEG LA to us. That is from Cisco to everyone who wants to use a blog, and it's permitted by the licensing, just the same as Flash today can be downloaded from Adobe as a binary blob and neither I (as a user) nor Mozilla needs to pay MPEG LA.
I still see lots of anger, as well as confusion. Anger leads to the dark side.
A hopeful sign, kind of: you started with "betrayal" (Harold Pinter play!) and now you are faulting Mozilla for being confused, or for not reforming All The Things instantly. A bit of a climb-down -- just sayin'.
Please note that we don't like any of the bad patent-pooling, rent-seeking behavior either. Failing to overcome it all at once, finding an incremental path to what we believe will be a better future, not throwing ourselves on all the swords, is part of how Mozilla operates. If you want purity, there are prefs you can set and add-ons you can install in Firefox. If that's not pure enough because you have to set prefs or use add-ons, there are tiny share browsers you can use instead.
I'm not saying "there's the door", rather I'm explicitly reaffirming that Mozilla does not consider every bad reality imposed on competitive browsers to be a make-or-break principle test (Monty made it sound like that; Mitchell and I do not agree), which we can pass only by rejecting reality and therefore very likely shrinking to tiny market share.
You wrote "MPEGLA was terrified of WebRTC and HTML5 standardising under a truly royalty free ...". Note the conjunction, also the past tense ("was"). When I called you on being wrong (HTML was never going to standardize on VP8/WebM), you changed your argument. Are you implying that WebRTC making VP9 (not 8) MTI would in the future affect HTML? If so, dream on. If not, you shifted your argument, and plonk.
BTW I answered your Daala vs. hardware question. Read more carefully. Getting into hardware as second codec is hard for any codec, even with a big sugar daddy (Google). Leapfrog via the GPU is the better way.
Oh please, Cisco is part of MPEG LA and you'd have to be incredibly naive to believe that this was Cisco striking it out on their own to offer a 'solution'. This is MPEG LA's offering, brought to you by one of it's members.
And likewise it doesn't take a genious to realize that you switching sides one week before the vote came as a result of discussion with Cisco, to offer broader support for h264 as the WebRTC standard.
So yes, I say you sold out.
>Fourth, MPEG LA was not terrified of HTML5 standardizing on a truly RF codec, because HTML5 was never going to do any such thing.
Oh I'm sure this royalty free h264 binary blob offering from MPEG LA was due to the kindness of their hearts.
Of course they were terrified, because even if this was just for WebRTC and not HTML5, it would have set a precedent for a fully open source and royalty free codec, with all the benefits that come along with it, which in turn would increase demands for fully open web video solutions in all areas.
Also you totally avoided the question I posed regarding your 'hardware support' argument, and where that leaves Dalaa as anything more than a toy project.
I held you guys to much too high standards it seems (much higher than any others in the web industry), I was obviously wrong.