It’s Killing Flash
Let me put it up front, Apple is not a great force for user freedom – but I am appreciative of one side effect of the popularity of the iPhone (and the expected popularity of the iPad): Flash is on the ropes.
One of the big failures of Moonlight in my eyes is that it is not a “Flash Killer”. Instead, it is a “Flash Replacer” – and replacing Adobe’s proprietary offering with Microsoft’s proprietary offering is hard to claim as a victory for Freedom. (Not too hard to claim as a victory for Microsoft, but that’s a tanget with which I shall not go off.)
Excluding the non-Free nature of the H.264 codec, it is absolutely fantastic that Flash is rendered superfluous for sites like You Tube. This is “the user doesn’t care” applied correctly: if all the user needs is video delivery, why is the format not open, free, and standardized?
In fact, if a format is positioning itself as a “standard”, why does anyone even entertain the thought of patent-encumbered, proprietary, closed, non-Free offerings controlled by a single vendor? That seems so crazy to me on a number of different levels! How many more times must we do the faildance?
Fixing that bug
Anyway, the H.264 codec is a hard problem to ignore, because it is not Free as in Freedom, nor Free as in Beer (except under limited circumstances), but it is quite popular. It is a win over a single company’s proprietary solution, but a slight and incomplete one.
Fortunately, we may have a chance of fixing that – because Google owns a new company with several successful codecs(On2) and, as the FSF points out in an open letter, Google is in a very good position to leverage YouTube in combination with a freed codec into a solution that benefits everyone!
Not only that, but as the FSF open letter points out, it will be especially tricky for Google (and other companies that use On2 codecs) to raise the same objections to its own codecs that it did to Ogg Theora!
Confluence
I like the idea of Apple and Google coming together to kill Flash and promote a Free standard in the video codec space. I don’t think either one will do it out of altruism, but the nifty thing is that it doesn’t require selfless motives.
Apple has already rejected Flash on its most successful platform – so anything that diminishes the importance of Flash is a win for Apple.
Google benefits in multiple ways: assuming that On2′s performance claims are correct, a more effecient codec is a win for a bandwith intensive site like You Tube; there’s the safety of not relying on a standard that someone else controls; and there’s the cachet of introducing a standard.
Other Takes – One Good
Diary Of An x264 Developer has a nice overview of the entire situation, and although I think he misses the mark on a few minor issues[1], it’s worth reading, especially if you aren’t sure why there’s such an undercurrent of disgust with Adobe.
I appreciate his analysis of the difficulties involved in getting an alternative to H.264 widely adopted, and although I think there are challenges, I also think Google + 1 other big player can make it happen. As You Tube goes, so goes internet video.
[1] He says “.264 is free until at least 2016 for internet distribution”, but it is my understanding that the royalty free period only applies to not-charged-for Internet video. He makes this error a few times in a few different ways.
Other Takes – One Bad
Over at ZDnet, Dana Blankenhorn tries to concoct some scenario where Google opening up a codec turns into an antitrust violation. I’m not shocked (considering the source), but there it is.
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