Unfortunatelly this argument does not fly [LWN.net]

Unfortunatelly this argument does not fly

Posted Jul 7, 2009 0:27 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
In reply to: Unfortunatelly this argument does not fly by khim
Parent article: Ogg codecs dropped from HTML5

The only reason these codecs were patented, is because there was a possibility to do so (read: sweet sound of monopoly - ka-ching!). If that wasn't a possibility, they would still get invented just fine. And that's because they were required to get digital video going. Which was a requirement of _other_ industries, not (only) the software industry.

If anything, global financial crisis has shown how short memories we all have. Market will never crash again, house prices will never go down, blah, blah. Same thing here. Software was being written before it was protected by patents just fine. Innovation aplenty. The rest is just greed.

Why are you so sure?

Posted Jul 7, 2009 0:55 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

If that wasn't a possibility, they would still get invented just fine.

As patentable hardware solution, perhaps? Sure if the history went this way free software we'd all used some form of hardware video/audio encoders today (with analog and digital parts). Whole different world... Better then current one? I'm not so sure...

Why are you so sure?

Posted Jul 7, 2009 13:20 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

Fine by me, as long as I am free to build my own decoder in software.