Time for another Week in Review. We had a fairly regular week this week, with the focus somehow being Mac cloners, The Pirate Bay, Mono, and Browsers were also in the spotlight this week with the release of Firefox 3.5, disagreements on the video tag codec, and talking about KHTML.
Especially the second half of the week was dominated by news on Mac clones. We learned that Psystar, kind of the Adam of the Mac clone market, crawled out of chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, to many people’s surprise. In addition, they continue to defy Apple by launching a new line of Mac clones, the Open(7).
In addition to all this, we learned late Friday night that the German Mac cloner PearC has done some major expanding, which seems to indicate that there’s a market for this kind of thing. PearC expanded its business into France, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. PearC appears to be different from Psystar in that it uses high-quality casings from Lian Li, a respected brand in this market. We also debated where on earth the idea comes from that Mac OS X’s price is subsidised by the hardware sales Apple obviously has.
The first half of the week was dominated news surrounding The Pirate Bay. The torrent search engine, fined earlier for sharing 33 songs, resulting in a massive fine and jail time, has been been acquired by the Swedish Global Gaming Factory, who revealed later what they are planning to do with the torrent site.
Mono was – again – in the news this week, since two parties made their position known on whether or not Mono should be used by or included in Free software projects. Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation took a remarkably practical stance; he advised everyone not to develop for it, but was at the same time content that Mono is at least available for those that need it. Ubuntu simply reiterated their position that since Ubuntu has received no patent threats, there’s no reason to remove it from their distribution.
On the browser front we saw the release of Firefox 3.5, which brings numerous speed improvements as well as support for various HTML5 features such as the audio and video tags. Speaking of HTML5 – browser maker were unable to settle on a codec for the video tag, mostly because Apple refuses to implement support for Ogg Theora, which all other browser makers do implement (except for Microsoft, who hasn’t implemented the video tag at all).
On a related note, we also discussed the state of KHTML, and whether or not there’s a future for KDE’s homegrown rendering engine.
Speaking of HTML5 – browser maker were unable to settle on a codec for the video tag, mostly because Apple refuses to implement support for Ogg Theora,
While I think Apple stance on this issue is really stupid, saying that it failed because of Apple is, to put it mildly, utterly absurd.
Firefox has a bigger Market Share than Safari now, and if anyone is hindering the video tag from being widely accepted it’s Microsoft who don’t even give a sh*t about HTML5 at all.
Whether Apple supported ogg wouldn’t matter, if IE would suddenly support ogg. You bet Apple would follow suit and implement it, if that happened, they can’t be left behind. So please do keep things in relation here.
He can’t help it… he’s the equivalent of Fox News in the United States… completely off-base.
Chances of Microsoft actually supporting an open codec is less than that of an unbiased opinion from some of the folks who frequent this site. (read: Microsoft would never support a non-Microsoft technology even if it would improve interoperability… remember their implementation of their own PDF-killer?)
Kelly
You don’t know your history.
*Adobe* prevented Microsoft from including PDF in Office, as Adobe did not want Microsoft to provide said feature for free.
Kinda funny isn’t it? I mean, the MS Office with PDF creation would certainly challenge Adobe’s product. But rather than pay the licensing fee (which Microsoft demands of all using their codecs and components) they chose to create a completely useless technology. Well, I guess it’s not useless if you’re one of the masses… but having someone send me a MDI file when I was living Ubuntu was frustrating.
Just so I can clarify it: you feel that all software should be free of cost and we shouldn’t have to pay for what we want to use. Does that sum it up, Thom?
I don’t know what Thom thinks, but I think all these formats with lots of strings attached is a bad thing.
Keyword: mostly.
Yes, it failed mostly because of Apple. Had Apple implemented Theora, then every web developers would only need a single Theora file to cover ALL HTML5-capable browsers. It is ONLY because of Apple that developers now have to encode TWO files, just to please Apple.
getting pretty sick of the retard crowd going after apple because their favourite ‘opensource’ codec isn’t going to be getting a free pass.
ignoring the bitrate to quality differences (hey, google even said this for youtube as for their reason to not even touch theora), what you people need to realize is playback speed of content going forward has to be taken into consideration (hey flash cpu usage sucks, especially for mobiles).
a big push from apple is to get playable content on mobile hardware. there are a ton of h264 dedicated hardware for dirt cheap while there is nothing happening right now or in the near future for theora decoding.
everything being made today has h264 hardware acceleration and the smallest devices can play HD content now.
i really don’t see what mozilla can’t include an h264 decoder, it’s not like they don’t make any money.
Educate yourself:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the-html-5…
Whoa! Broadcasting fees on the h264 codec? I didn’t know that was being planned. I see someone saw the deep pockets over at Google and Hulu.
This is starting to feel like the Bluray vs HD-DVD debate.
What about other video streaming sites besides Google? Have they been vocal about this at all?
Maybe the porn industry will once again choose a format for us. I guess we just sit back and wait to see who does what.
Thank you for the link – all I can say in response to the article is wow. I am truly shocked at the licencing – I thought the only thing that one had to worry about was simply the CODEC itself but given that broadcast fee’s are going to kick in 2010, the CODEC is unaffordable for all but the large media empires. When one views what one would pay for h264, it makes Windows Media Audio and Video look reasonably priced.
I hope that Theora takes off; but I guess the only way is a strong campaign to get ‘that codec installed’ by way of propagating theora plugin for Quicktime.
One story osnews missed this week was this one, fresh from Grand Canaria Desktop Summit:
http://flors.wordpress.com/2009/07/05/maemo-harmattan-keynote-at-gc…
Even though there were rumors and indications of this circulating around, the information is now public.