The post by Jason Garrett-Glaser (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1361442) suggests this move might be strange for Mozilla since there's a high chance that VP8 will be patent trolled soon.
Well if they do anything related to the web in their line of business they're going to hampered by Google withdrawing the patent rights to use VP8 when they sue.
Does Apple or any other consumer electronics manufacturer in MPEG-LA really want to be left out on the cold on that?
This is just a special case of why Non-Practising Entities (i.e. trolls) are the terrorists of asymmetrical patent warfare.
I suppose I didn't mean "patent troll", but instead spoke with a growing distaste for the way patent law is practiced. When I read that article I found difficulty locating where I stood between calling something a compression technique and just... math.
I've never understood the "just math" argument. Couldn't a similar argument be made against all drug patents ("just chemistry"), all mechanical device patents ("just physics"), and so on?
Oh, I agree that the argument applies more broadly than "just math". I'm also not sure what the ideal patent protects. It seems to lie somewhere on the discovery-invention axis, but I don't know where.
And when Mozilla is sued by MPEG-LA for patent infringement will you say the same thing? Of the companies who say they will support this codec so far I think Opera is weakest and will be sued first, but Mozilla is domestic so they might be the one to take one for the team...
Will they start using GStreamer in Firefox like in one of their Fennec branches, or will they just add libvpx along with the existing liboggplay and implement their own half-baked media handling layer?
Interesting to see Mozilla support the idea that Theora provides markedly worse quality-per-bit than H.264.