Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

http://blogs.fsfe.org/hugo/2010/04/open-letter-to-steve-jobs/

by ZeroGravitas • 16 years ago

169 108 16 years ago

blogs.fsfe.org

jsz02• 16 years ago

you like Openness so much that when you use “Open Source” Software to build your Mac operating system

Only some parts of it. The bulk of OSX is closed source.

May I remind you that H.264 is not an open standard?

Jobs said H.264 is an industry standard not an open standard

boredguy8• 16 years ago

But the whole point in this debate is that Flash is also, for better or worse, an industry standard.

pohl2• 16 years ago

Is there a specification?

I think "de facto standard" is a more appropriate phrase for Flash.

jsz02• 16 years ago

That's a fair point. I think that's more or less how Google approaches it even though they are not fans of closed web formats.

I do think there is a world of difference between a big complex closed platform exclusively available from Adobe and H.264 which has a variety of encoders/decoders available from multiple license holders. I seem to recall in the past Adobe has licensed in Flash to Nokia in almost the same way. Nokia ported & optimized the code for some of their handsets (N900 and others) It would be interesting to know if Adobe offered a similar arrangement to Apple. That would completely debunk everything Apple has been saying if they had the flexibility to control the Flash implementation on the iPhone themselves.

olefoo• 16 years ago

Was an industry standard.

And that's the point, flash has some real drawbacks and since it's not an open standard with multiple implementations, it stagnated while Adobe thought it had no competition.

gvb• 16 years ago

To add to jsz0's correct observation, H.264 does not show up at all under the first section discussing proprietary vs. open standards.

H.264 shows up once under the heading Second, there’s the "full web" but not really a primary point.

The main H.264 is in the section Fourth, there’s battery life. Jobs wrote that the benefit of H.264 vs. flash was that there was hardware decryption support for it. The result of hardware decryption support was a doubling of battery life vs. software decryption (e.g. flash).

I see a lot of jumping from Job's discussion of open vs. proprietary to his advocacy of H.264. While there are serious problems with the openness of H.264 (from an OSS POV), Jobs tied battery life to H.264 in his objection of flash codecs, not openness.

latortuga• 16 years ago

People are making this jump because Job's is committing the fallacy of special pleading when he applies his rule of openness to Flash but not to H.264.

alec• 16 years ago

"A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now."

That's kind of scary.

davidw• 16 years ago

Is it real? I am no fan of Apple or Jobs, but it almost sounds too evil.

Edit: in reply to a "tweet" of mine, he posted the headers:

http://hugoroy.eu/jobs-os.php

It's really hard to believe they'd be such arrogant jerks as to go after something open source like that.

stingraycharles• 16 years ago

And on top of that, I'm pretty sure webkit infringes at least some patents too, which is used as an example of Apple supporting and contributing to open source. So he's using double standards again.

ovi256• 16 years ago

Do you have any proof that the "arrogant jerks" at Apple go after Theora themselves ? Steve Jobs did not state it anywhere. Way to get worked up over the wrong guys.

chc• 16 years ago

This isn't "Apple" or "Jobs" going after anyone. Jobs is stating that members of MPEG-LA plan to do so. If Steve Jobs mentioning that other people plan to sue is an example of Jobs being "evil," then logically you must be evil too since you have also mentioned the potential lawsuit.

riferguson2• 16 years ago

Presumably it would be the holders of the putatively infringed patents that would be assembling the "pool". I don't think Apple is in the Video Codec patent-holding business. As a major licensee of H.264, you'd have to presume Apple be in a position to know if someone else was rounding up the usual suspects.

vetinari7• 16 years ago

Apple is not only licensee, but also licensor.

Every time you license H.264 (or something other from MPEG-4 pool), a cut goes to Apple (also to Microsoft and Nokia).

10ren• 16 years ago

Google purchased the creators (On2 Technologies) of the basis (VP3) of Theora. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/04/google-will-open-so...

Now, just because you create something doesn't mean it doesn't infringe on someone's patent (read: it could infringe a patent). However, google presumably did some serious due-diligence before forking over their measly $133M, especially on the patent position. That doesn't make mean they're right, but it does mean that they think the patent position is pretty strong. Of course, they would have focused on VP8, the one they bought, not Theora's VP3 (and which might infringe due to subsequent open-source additions.)

Google might open source VP8 on May 19-20 http://www.reelseo.com/html5-vp8-google/

CamperBob4• 16 years ago

At which point Google gets to find out what patents VP8 infringes.

Ballsy move.

papachito2• 16 years ago

Actually, theora devs have been asking for the patent pool for a long time so they can work around patents once and for all http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309412

So this is excellent news for Theora, as it could be an end to the "submarine patent" FUD.

jamesbressi• 16 years ago

Steve has been quite busy with his email lately. I don't remember him ever doing this much correspondence via email.

Very interesting.

futuremint• 16 years ago

I had the same thought. I think its because he wants to get "Sent from my iPad" on the internet on as many web pages and into as many minds as possible. Its a marketing ploy.

aphyr• 16 years ago

Ah, that's why they're so short!

commieneko• 16 years ago

He's been doing this for years. I know several people that have gotten terse, 3 or 4 word responses to him. It's only recently that the press and the bloggers have noticed this.

zweben• 16 years ago

He's been doing short emails for years, and the occasional open letter, but it seems that he's doing it a lot more as of late.

Presumably in response to all the recent Apple controversy.

ErrantX• 16 years ago

I think that, ultimately, Apple have as much ability to define what an Open Standard means as the FSF within the context of what they are saying.

As it happens I think I agree with where Jobs is coming from... or rather I think this letter nit picks at a specific phrase (Open Standard) that SJ's was just using in a different way to how the FSF would.

Ultimately what Jobs meant by Open Standard was reasonably apparent (for the reasons laid out in this letter!) so nit picking over it seems a meta point.

madmaze• 16 years ago

Props to Steve to actually answer to this open letter, but i think he could have put a little more effort into it, sounds like he has no confidence in open source. I wish apple would be a little more involved in open source.

ghurlman• 16 years ago

He did put effort into it - there's a full paragraph there, Steve's emails rarely go beyond a sentence fragment; rightly so, as I doubt he has the time to research and write out a fully-formed response.

illumin8• 16 years ago

I think Steve has plenty of confidence in open source. He's just a realist and understands that current software patent law doesn't really allow for completely open video codecs. Even if you create an open implementation of them, you're going to be subject to patent lawsuits, and as we know, most open source projects don't have the funding to withstand the legal battles.

pgbovine• 16 years ago

I wish apple would be a little more involved in open source.

hopefully they keep the LLVM team well-funded and give them good freedoms.

bingobongo• 16 years ago

"A lot of commercial software comes with H.264 encoders and decoders, and some computers arrive with this software preinstalled. This leads a lot of people to believe that they can legally view and create H.264 videos for whatever purpose they like. Unfortunately for them, it ain’t so. Maybe the best example comes from the Final Cut Pro license:"

http://bemasc.net/wordpress/2010/02/02/no-you-cant-do-that-w...

andr• 16 years ago

While I agree with the spirit of the message to Steve, the attack on Apple not sharing back open source software modifications is out of place. Darwin is open source. WebKit is open source and actively developed by Apple, giving competitors the ability to quickly catch up with one of the iPhone's biggest advantages. Apple is also the chief contributor to LLVM.

tsuraan• 16 years ago

Webkit is open-source because the people who wrote it (KDE devs) put it under the LGPL. Apple was playing catch-up, and used the best code base they could to get started. They aren't philanthropists, they are just (grudgingly) abiding by the license of the software they are building on.

panic• 16 years ago

It certainly used to be grudging -- originally Apple just threw a huge clump of code back to the KHTML guys, technically satisfying the LGPL, but not doing anyone much good. That's a far cry from the community they've built around the project now. I wouldn't call Apple philanthropists, but they're not simply following the license either.

albertzeyer• 16 years ago

They also could have rewritten that. The original KHTML code is a pretty small part (about 140k loc initially) compared to the WebKit project (about 3M loc).

Also, they only really needed to have WebCore and JavaScriptCore open but they decided to make all of WebKit open later on (all the rest under a BSD licence).

scott_s2• 16 years ago

That's true of all companies that contribute to open source.

demallien• 16 years ago

Macruby is open source. Apple was under no obligation to open source it, yet they have...

pistoriusp• 16 years ago

Grand Central Dispatch also comes to mind.

btilly• 16 years ago

Hopefully Bilski renders these patent issues moot. I really, really hope that.

And if it does, I expect multi-media to improve quite a bit in the next 2 years.

Quarrelsome• 16 years ago

If you don't know what "Bilski" is (like me). I founds us a link:

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Bilski_overview

CamperBob4• 16 years ago

I doubt it. Bilski will be decided by SCOTUS in exactly the same way they "decided" Eldred... by punting it back to a very well-bribed Congress.

And that won't even be the wrong decision, really. There is no constitutional basis for a ruling on software and/or business-method patentability, one way or the other. It's clear that Congress is supposed to make those calls.

jcl3• 16 years ago

All video codecs are covered by patents.

All the popular ones, maybe. But MPEG-1 is over twenty years old, so unless there is a submarine patent out there, all the patents on it have already expired. Likewise, most aspects of MPEG-2 should be freed up within a decade. Even H.264 will eventually be unencumbered, given enough time.

blasdel2• 16 years ago

On2 had a pile of active patents covering VP3, which they granted irrevocable royalty-free licenses to when they abandoned it to become Theora.

Nobody's ever done codec development without either filing a ton of patents or at least publishing rigorous documentation to establish prior art (Dirac). Some of those patents may no longer be in force, but they still exist.

ZeroGravitas4• 16 years ago

The On2 patents on VP3 only covered some optimization techniques and are not required to implement VP3 or Theora.

PontusVull• 16 years ago

The writer seems to think that an open standard must be free of cost but is that actually true? Or is it just what many would like to be true?

ZeroGravitas4• 16 years ago

Most standards, up until the turn of the century, were required by governments to have RAND licensing terms in order to prevent abuse of market power. That's Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory, so you could charge fees but couldn't mess with competitors.

Governments are now pushing for Open Standards which must be RAND-Z or RAND-RF. Z stands for Zero cost, RF for Royalty Free. These Open Standards make much more sense for software or services delivered at low or no cost via the web, or as Free or Open Source software.

tlb2• 16 years ago

h.264 is far, far more open than Flash. What matters is that the spec is public and that you can choose from many implementations. There are no usable competing implementations of Flash, but dozens for h.264 including excellent open-source ones.

The h.264 terms aren't onerous. If you ship less than 100,000 devices you pay nothing. At large scale, it's $0.10 / unit. When selling hardware, that's a pretty light tax.

As Jobs points out, Theora is not immune to patents. On2's many patents are irrevocably licensed for free, but there are thousands more patents that may apply held by trolls. It sucks to ship devices with unknown patent liabilities. It almost destroyed RIM, for example.

dhimes2• 16 years ago

Here's a summary of the license terms:

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/AVC_TermsS...

Let's say you make videos and sell access to them on your web site on a title-by-title basis :) Videos <= 12 min, no charge. Videos > 12 min, USD $0.02 per title or 2% of access price, whichever is less.

cpr• 16 years ago

Oh, maybe that's the basis of the general YouTube 10-minute limit...

tlb2• 16 years ago

Right, 2% is unlikely to change anyone's business model.

gizmomagico• 16 years ago

Oh, who cares about H264 compared to 3.3.1..

CamperBob4• 16 years ago

Exactly. This whole video-codec business is a nice bit of deflection on Jobs's part.

KevinBongart• 16 years ago

I don't get it.

In his open letter, Jobs explains why he chose HTML5 and H.264 instead of Flash, and the author here doesn't not answer about Flash but H.264.

Even though Theora looks more open than H.264 for video, I think HTML5/H.264 still stands more open than Flash for the entire web.

So, yes, Theora sounds cool, but that's not Jobs point. The point is, get rid of Flash.

kgrad7• 16 years ago

Could someone please explain to me how Flash isn't open? To my knowledge, everything about flash is open other than Adobe's IDE. The spec has been released, the sdk is OSS and anyone is free to compile to SWF... Am I mistaken here?

pmjordan3• 16 years ago

The player certainly very much isn't open, aside from the Tamarin runtime.

kgrad7• 16 years ago

Can you qualify that statement? edit: You are correct, the player provided by Adobe is not open.

However, anyone is free to make their own player, one alternative player is Gnash: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnash

Terretta3• 16 years ago

Consider the "definition" shared in the letter.

Compare that definition to WebKit, then to Flash.

kgrad7• 16 years ago

Which part of the definition does flash violate? Also, Apple doesn't give much credit to KDE with WebKit, they certainly like to imply that they are very open with it without mentioning its origins...

wrs• 16 years ago

I really wish people would stop redefining the word "open" to mean whatever makes them feel good. (Vain hope.) Patents are totally orthogonal to copyrights and standards. You can put the source under whatever terms you want, and get whatever international standards body you want to bless the protocol, and that has nothing whatever to do with the patent troll who will show up the next day and start charging license fees.

pyre• 16 years ago

http://www.osnews.com/story/23058/Theora_More_of_a_Patent_Th...

  For 15 years, Xiph.Org has carefully "played by the
  rules," fully within the bounds, intent, and letter of
  intellectual property and patent law. For the past ten
  years we've informed the entire world, including MPEG LA,
  of our specifications and algorithms in detail. We've
  requested in open letters that any group believing we
  are infringing to inform us so that we make take
  immediate corrective action.

  I predict that MPEG LA may counter that they know
  groups have been pressured into licensing patents in order
  to use Theora. This has been a recent back-room assertion.
  You might want to ask point blank if MPEG LA itself or any
  of its constituent members has engaged in this practice,
  thus manufacturing the evidence that "vindicates" their
  patent allegations. I beg you - tell me immediately if you
  get a straight answer (or good video of any squirming)!

  I'm sure you can tell I'm a bit peeved; this has been going
  on for over a decade. It's amazing they've never been
  called out on it.

papachito2• 16 years ago

I asked on the Theora mailing list their thoughts on SJ's answer and this is what I got from one of the dev:

> (...) A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now. >

I think that's great news... If the "industry" finally compiles a list of patents that they think theora voilates we can:

1. find prior art. 2. work around the possible valid patents.

Afterwards all the submarine patents are gone, and we can prove it...

CamperBob4• 16 years ago

Afterwards all the submarine patents are gone, and we can prove it...

Well, no, only the submarine patents from MPEG-LA signatories are gone.

randomposter• 16 years ago

http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2010-April/003766.htm...

also

http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2010-April/003769.htm...

quizbiz• 16 years ago

Why doesn't he at least say something about Apple's closed ecosystem?

morphir• 16 years ago

may I add that software patents are non-existent here in Europe. So a codec made here in Europe should not have to worry about infringing anything..

Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

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