Patents were never the reason for a lack of VP8 adoption. When you have the likes of Adobe, Apple, Canon, Microsoft and Sony firmly against it was always going to be a dead on arrival.
I honestly don't know why Google bothered to buy the company in the first place. Seems an odd place to assert a competing position.
I'll reiterate what I told you back when we had this discussion in the past. Google bought On2 and developed vp8 because they wanted a codec they could directly adapt to their needs when it comes to their many services, with alot of effort spent on real-time video.
I mentioned Google Glass for instance, to which you retorted that Google Glass was 'vapourware'. Funny enough you then spent tons of posts trying to raise concerns regarding Google Glass privacy implications, you sure spend alot of time addressing vapourware.
It's almost as if you had an anti-Google agenda...
I don't have an anti-Google agenda. I just don't see why Google is actively trying to make life more difficult for consumers by promoting an inferior codec (in every way possible). I include Mozilla into that list as well.
When the dinosaurs of old media die, the web will remain. The question is whether that web will be open and royalty free, or owned by new dinosaurs. The purchase of On2 was a move in the direction of an open web.
I unfortunately am cynical and don't believe that in the presence of so many commercial interests that free and open is going to reign supreme. The odds are simply too stacked against it.
Instead I would much prefer to see standards made available under low royalty, FRAND terms. This has worked to great effect for WiFi, USB, Bluetooth etc.
But of course that is looking harder to achieve with FRAND abusers like Google around.
>Instead I would much prefer to see standards made available under low royalty, FRAND terms. This has worked to great effect for WiFi, USB, Bluetooth etc.
FRAND works fine for hardware because by the time you spend $100 to manufacture and ship the thing you can spend $5 licensing patents.
It fails miserably for software because it's incompatible with free software, which means that the free software people have to create a competing standard that they can implement and we get useless fragmentation that hurts everybody. Produce something compatible with free software to begin with and none of that needs to happen.
I mean WTF, just require the patent holders to license the patents royalty free for free software implementations in order to have their patents included in the standard, and then they can still collect royalties from manufacturers who do hardware implementations. It's not like they were going to get any royalties from free software developers in the first place.
Then let your cynicism drive you to hedge with H.26x but hope and advocate for something royalty free and technically equivalent to emerge. There's no need to attack VP8 and other royalty-free endeavors just because the world is cold. Look at what happened with SOPA, and now with bills being introduced to claw back against the DMCA. I wouldn't have expected either of those things to happen two years ago.
Old habits die hard; old industries die harder.
Abuse of FRAND patents is a different matter, but I will point out that it was in retaliation for asserting some pretty ridiculous patents in the first place. The nice thing about VP8 is that, even if Google turns evil (or, if you're of the opinion they already are, even more evil), the patent promise they granted is irrevocable.
I honestly don't know why Google bothered to buy the company in the first place. Seems an odd place to assert a competing position.