Mozilla reconsiders H.264

All the stuff on www.mozilla.org about believing in "free, open and accessible to all" is just lip service.

If market share is actually threatened, then all that quickly goes out the window.

Market share is more important than their principles.

I'm not even sure I want them to succeed if that is now their approach.

So what happens in the future if mozilla decide that selling my browsing habits will be good for their market share?

How will mozilla resist H.265 with a straight face given they caved on H.264? Or any encumbered codec for that matter.

What about DRM video, will mozilla cave in on that too? Only after the other guys have?

What will this mean for linux users? The distros won't be able to legally ship H.264 codecs in a lot of the world. So there is no OS level codec to hand off too. Mozilla won't buy a H.264 license (or at least probably can't get one that covers open source and all downstream) and so can't ship it themselves.

Desktop PCs have video codecs in HW these days, but ATI/NVIDIA etc. are too scared to release doco, so the free video drivers can't expose that capability.

And what does this say about HTML5. Supposedly meant to free us of the proprietary and buggy flash player. It seems post-flash player, linux users won't even be able to legally watch most web video.

And does that mean you can't even implement HTML or a complete web browser in software while being open source?

Linux will be a second or third class citizen of the web?

Maybe only proprietary OS vendors (Apple/MS) and advertising platform vendors will be the only ones able to implement a complete web browser from now on.