| ▲ | mike_hearn 9 days ago | |
Google funding free stuff is not a real social mechanism. It's not something you can point to and say that's how society should work in general. Our industry has come to take Google's enormous corporate generosity for granted, but there was zero need for it to be as helpful to open computing as it has been. It would have been just as successful with YouTube if Chrome was entirely closed source and they paid for video codec licensing, or if they developed entirely closed codecs just for their own use. In fact nearly all Google's codebase is closed source and it hasn't held them back at all. Google did give a lot away though, and for that we should be very grateful. They not only released a ton of useful code and algorithms for free, they also inspired a culture where other companies also do that sometimes (e.g. Llama). But we should also recognize that relying on the benevolence of 2-3 idealistic billionaires with a browser fetish is a very time and place specific one-off, it's not a thing that can be demanded or generalized. In general, R&D is costly and requires incentives. Patent pools aren't perfect, but they do work well enough to always be defining the state-of-the-art and establish global standards too (digital TV, DVDs, streaming.... all patent pool based mechanisms). | ||
| ▲ | breve 8 days ago | parent | next [-] | |
> Google funding free stuff is not a real social mechanism. It's not a social mechanism. And it's not generosity. Google pushes huge amounts of video and audio through YouTube. It's in Google's direct financial interest to have better video and audio codecs implemented and deployed in as many browsers and devices as possible. It reduces Google's costs. Royalty-free video and audio codecs makes that implementation and deployment more likely in more places. > Patent pools aren't perfect They are a long way from perfect. Patent pools will contact you and say, "That's a nice codec you've got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it." Three different patent pools are trying to collect licencing fees for AV1: https://www.sisvel.com/licensing-programmes/audio-and-video-... | ||
| ▲ | 9 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |
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