[taligent]

Exactly that Apple Island with their industry standard H.264 and AAC files.

And Google with their proprietary WebM.

[kkowalczyk]

Yes, a completely open-sourced, royalty free and patent-free WebM is "proprietary".

Patent-laden format for which you have to pay multi-million royalties is "industry standard".

[taligent]

It is not "patent-free". If it was I am sure Google would indemnify users from patent infringement lawsuits.

Fact is that at least 12 organisations have already said that WebM infringes on their patents.

[dtf]

Is there any open-source, royalty-free technology you can think of that comes with a legal indemnity against patent lawsuits?

[taligent]

Many providers of Linux and Java products indemnify their users e.g. RedHat, Novell.

[tonfa]

s/users/customers/ ?

[mtgx]

WebM is not proprietary. It's open source. You can find it here:

http://www.webmproject.org/

[taligent]

It IS proprietary.

Google owns WebM and unilaterally makes the decisions about the direction of the format. H.264 is a standard and driven by a standards committee and process comprising numerous companies.

[surrealize]

> It IS proprietary.

Also, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and innocence is strength!

[sp332]

The code may be open source but the format/spec is 100% controlled by Google. Forking the code won't help you change the direction of format development. If anyone besides Google wants to make changes, they'd have to fork the entire spec under a different standards body.

[jonknee]

As you would with any standard. If h.264 were open source you couldn't fork it and have it work with existing h.264 devices. It would be a new standard.