It's snarky to compare Mozilla to Moses.
Oh c'mon
-- they start with the same 2 letters, they're both visionaries for their time,
and they both led their followers from pain (*cough* IE *cough*) to a better
place (e.g. Firefox). Or whatever :P. Honestly, I just wanted to create a visual
metaphor so that people could see how Mozilla is wanting us to accept their
acceptance of proprietary, non-Free codecs.
Mozilla is staffed by a bunch of
really well-meaning, smart individuals. I'm certain of it, because otherwise why
would I give them money from time to time? :-) And as much as we rag on them,
it's really because we want them to succeed, and we are so pained to see what
compromises they're having to make just in order to stay afloat and relevant in
the browser space.
Brendan Eich has some
useful commentary here. In his defense, he goes further than I had
remembered in creating a game plan for the future and describing some of the
future battles we could and should try to win. But he doesn't go far
enough.
1) Someone has to call out Google. And call them out in a big way.
They promised that they would leverage Chrome to boost WebM by dropping H.264
support, but they didn't. And WebM acceptance has most certainly hurt because of
it. Put a big sign up on the front page of Mozilla.org, call up someone at
Google, or whatever it takes, but please try to get to the bottom of this.
Because if we couldn't count on Google's promises this time, how can we rely on
them to stay in the fight for any future battles of the war? (and we really,
really could benefit from Google's help)
2) Mozilla may have to support
H.264 in some markets so it doesn't die, but it shouldn't take it lying
down. It should educate the users -- heck, it could put a little note in the
mobile browser the first time it boots describing why its violating its own
"open web" principles, or create an education campaign asking websites to encode
their videos in WebM for Boot2Gecko devices.
3) I want a game plan for
H.265. As far as I know the best hope we have is "kill software patents."
There's no other game plan at all. That's really troublesome, especially as new
codecs = new patents = restart the countdown-to-expiry clock.
4) Perhaps
most importantly, I want to see information on what we can do. The FSF
has campaigns every so often about free/open video codecs, and other groups or
individuals put in a nice plug now and again, but we really need to have some
one-stop-shopping for interested people to help fight the next battle and put us
on track towards winning the free/open standards war. We need easy step-by-step
tutorials on how to use alternate codecs. The Play Ogg campaign website
looks like it was last updated in 2010. The diveintohtml5.org website that the
FSF points to on how to use the VIDEO tag doesn't even exist anymore. We need
new content, and we need to get creative about proselytizing to individuals,
organizations, and businesses.
As Eich says, "Can we win the long war? I
don’t know if we’ll see a final victory, but we must fight on." In order for the
fight to have meaning and for us to make progress, we really do need strong
leadership and clear, simple steps that community members can follow so that
they can lend their support to the cause. Because we're going to need a lot more
people involved to have even a chance of going up against juggernauts like Apple
and the MPEG-LA. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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