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Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

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Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#41

Post by tsuraan »

andr wrote: post #26

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.

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.

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#42

Post by ZeroGravitas »

PontusVull wrote: post #38

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?

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.

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#43

Post by panic »

tsuraan wrote: post #41
andr wrote: post #26

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.

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.

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.

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#44

Post by albertzeyer »

tsuraan wrote: post #41
andr wrote: post #26

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.

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.

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).

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#45

Post by samps »

riferguson wrote: post #25
vetinari wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I stand corrected. Apple has one patent in the H.264 pool, US 7292636, and one in the MPEG-4 Systems pool, US 6134243. I have no idea if either of these would be relevant to Theora. For what it's worth, there are hundreds of patents in the total MPEG-LA pool.

> For what it's worth, there are hundreds of patents in the total MPEG-LA pool.

Furthermore, it's not clear what Apple would stand to gain by enforcing its two patents that may or may not be relevant to Theora. Maybe I'm wrong, but media patent enforcement doesn't seem to be one of Apple's core businesses (HTC lawsuit notwithstanding). There are plenty of other companies, though, that likely have a vested interest in protecting their much-larger video patent portfolios.

I think it would be wrong to assume at this point that Apple is instigating patent litigation against Theora. Occam's razor would encourage the view that Apple knows the people who want to take down Theora and is rationally fearful of them.

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#46

Post by jonknee »

zweben wrote: post #23
commieneko wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Either that or more people are posting/linking them.

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#47

Post by olefoo »

boredguy8 wrote: post #8
jsz0 wrote: post #2

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

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

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.

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#49

Post by scott_s »

tsuraan wrote: post #41
andr wrote: post #26

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.

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.

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

Re: Open Letter to Steve Jobs (and a reply)

#50

Post by rictic »

Indyan wrote: post #15
snth wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't say Apple was assembling this patent pool.

But presumably, Apple is going to be a part of it. Remember that Apple does have stake in MPEG-LA.

As mentioned above, Apple has one patent out of hundreds in the H.264 pool, and one patent in MPEG-4 Systems Pool.

Maybe they'll be a part of it and maybe they won't, but it doesn't sound like they're big players in the video patent space.

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