google

Google hates H.264! H.264 is used almost everywhere, not just for Web video; it’s also the Blu-Ray encoding standard. So this is very exciting. Despite my knee-jerk pro-Apple response, I believe that Google is correct in stating that WebM is the better political choice for Web standards. It is open in the sense that there’s no licensing fee and Google has no ability to institute one. It is not an open standard insofar as the standard does not belong to an impartial standards body, which is slightly problematic, but practically speaking it’s not a huge deal. H.264 does, FWIW, belong to such a body. But it’s not free to license, and that is again the more important issue. ...

I’m certainly going to want to run it somewhere. I mean, hey, new toy. They’re talking a lot about the cloud; they’re not talking very much about the implications of what’s essentially a client OS. Will the cloud software be open source? If not, you’re awfully limited: it checks the signature of your OS every time you boot it. Can’t do much hacking that way. Also, custom firmware. Everyone who’s been bitching about the iPhone as a closed system should be paying close attention to this. In some ways this is tighter than the iPhone; an iPhone doesn’t check the cloud to see if it’s been hacked every time it boots up. ...