[gsnedders]

The far bigger financial advantage for them is the fact that they hit the maximum fee — so they end up paying comparably little per user.

I'm not sure Apple is even that concerned about the competition from such projects — all their major competitors have no issue with paying the licensing charges.

It's worthwhile pointing out that Mozilla nowadays use H.264/AAC/MP3 support from the platform layer, as does Opera (though, yes, most Linux distributions do not ship such things by default — but that's a small percentage of the market) — and in Opera's case the argument to not support it was always one of philosophy (avoiding giving themselves a competitive advantage that works against a free and open web) rather than one of finance (Opera has plenty of revenue to pay for the license).

When there were all the discussions around HTML5 and mandated video codecs the reasons that Apple publicly put forward seem reasonable from their point-of-view: supporting video codecs that no major company has previously shipped bears a risk of patent infringement cases (and defending such cases is expensive, even if your odds of winning them are good!) that might result in huge fines/compensation. When the majority of the content on the web was already using H.264 (and it seemed dubious that many sites would support more than just H.264 unless everyone dropped H.264 support, which seemed highly unlikely to happen), there was no compelling market reason to take on that risk. The de-facto state was the web already relied on a non-free codec, and mandating a free one was only of marginal benefit if nobody started using it (yes, it provides a free common baseline, but de-facto everyone has to support H.264 as a baseline anyway, however sad that is). This isn't so malicious as it is accepting the reality of the market, sadly.

When almost all browser installs support H.264 already, you may as well use it for WebRTC. Would it be nice if the web didn't rely on H.264? Yes. But we're already at a point of relying on it, so we may as well rely on it elsewhere.

[shmerl]

> This isn't so malicious as it is accepting the reality of the market, sadly.

What about the music market? Apple intentionally avoided supporting free codecs which are not patented. That's malice.

[gsnedders]

Yeah, the audio case is arguably far more interesting (enough major companies have shipped Vorbis and Speex that it is likely anyone holding a patent would've sued someone by now). One may speculate that by the time the iTunes Music Store launched (2003) they felt locked in to the set of codecs the iPod (launched 2001) supported natively (the CPU in it is weak, and while it is powerful enough for a modern, highly optimised Vorbis implementation, these didn't yet exist, and one must question running the CPU at almost total utilisation for heat/battery reasons…).

[shmerl]

Well, what happened in the past doesn't really explain why they still refuse to support them today. I really hope mandatory status of Opus in WebRTC will push it into QuickTime framework and it will mean implicit support by Apple everywhere.

[eridius]

They refuse to support them today because there's no benefit in doing so. Supporting codecs they're not supporting today takes both non-trivial engineering resources, but may expose them to patent risk depending on the codec in question. And pretty much by definition, the people who use these codecs aren't Apple customers anyway.

You seem to be arguing with the assumption that Apple could support these codecs effectively for free, and have deliberately chosen not to do out of malice. That's quite absurd.

[shmerl]

> They refuse to support them today because there's no benefit in doing so

That's nonsense. Clear benefit is supporting codecs which their users can encounter without forcing them to reencode to anything else. For instance, you buy some music in FLAC and can use it, rather than reencoding it first. I.e. interoperability and treating users well, rather than being jerks.

Clearly for Apple "benefit" means screwing users and degrading interoperability.

> Supporting codecs they're not supporting today takes both non-trivial engineering resources, but may expose them to patent risk depending on the codec in question

False pretenses to hide real intentions - retaining lock in and reducing interoperability, which were always Apple's notable goals. Specifcially about patent risks - they are already using a bunch of codecs like AAC, so obviously they aren't concerned about risks when using them. So they can't claim they are more scared with other codecs especially if they are explicitly patent free.

[eridius]

> Clear benefit is supporting codecs which their users can encounter without forcing them to reencode to anything else.

That assumes their users actually ever encounter such music. I fully expect that significantly less than 1% of Apple customers ever encounter FLAC music, and those that do, do so infrequently and with other options made available as well. Personally, every time I've seen FLAC as an option, it's been one of a set of options (typically including MP3 and AAC, and often even including ALAC).

> Clearly for Apple "benefit" means screwing users and degrading interoperability.

Bullshit. Nobody is being screwed here. Anyone who gets FLAC music is choosing to do so, and it's pretty trivial to reencode. And there is absolutely no interoperability issue here. FLAC is not a codec chosen for portability reasons; very few people have any reason to be using lossless audio to begin with.

> False pretenses to hide real intentions - retaining lock in and reducing interoperability, which were always Apple's notable goals

Bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit. Apple was at the forefront of pushing to remove DRM on music, and you're trying to accuse them of lock-in? Either you're horribly deluded, or you have your own anti-Apple agenda that you're trying to push here. Either way, you're pulling this argument from thin air and it is entirely incorrect.