41–50 of 151 posts
Can anyone explain if there is something particularly new or interesting about this image format? Or do I have to read the source code?
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How could Google own something written and supported in the authors' free time?
If you work at Google everything you make, even in your spare time, belongs to them. That's how the contracts work, unfortunately.
Or you can ask to retain ownership of your project, but then you don't get to do any of the above. This option is also sometimes (thanks DannyBee for correcting me) not available if your project is considered to be too similar to some critical Google interest. The basic idea is outlined here: https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/
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It's written by a Google employee, and therefore Google owns all rights to it. However, in all other respects it's just an open source project written and supported in the authors' free time.
How could Google own something written and supported in the authors' free time?
Is this what Google Photos uses for their unlimited "high quality" image storage?
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If you work at Google everything you make, even in your spare time, belongs to them. That's how the contracts work, unfortunately.
That's not true, at least not in California. But if you made it with Google resources then yes they own it.
People, for the most part, very badly misunderstand what california law says. For most large diversified corporations, the corporation will own all of it, because it will "Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer;"
Note that it's completely irrelevant what the employee is doing for them. Also note that most employees rarely have any idea of all the things their employer does.
By numbers, employees lose the vast majority of lawsuits under 2870 in california.
(I believe that the fact that people think it is so great is one of the things that holds us back from making it actually great)
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If you work at Google everything you make, even in your spare time, belongs to them. That's how the contracts work, unfortunately.
You have the option of having Google own the code, and in return you can work on it using Google hardware, work on it while at work, use other google code or discuss it with your coworkers freely. Or you can ask to retain ownership of your project, but then you don't get to do any of the above. This option is also sometimes (thanks DannyBee for correcting me) not available if your project is considered to be too simi…
Speaking as an IARC committee member, this is not quite correct. We have in fact, approved plenty of stuff that is close to what google is working on. For example, we've approved plenty of search engines. (The overall approval rate is >96% last i looked).
It's not so simple that i can easily draw principled bright lines for you though :)
It's the most serious attempt to date to make an open source replacement for JPEG which misses a lot of advances in data/image compression. I hope it stops the spreading of HEIF plagued by patents.
Because Webp was such a success?
We're seeing a lot of different formats lately. So to make this more generic, I'm thinking we should move to an encoding-independent format. That is, the file contains an encoding-id, and the decoder can be downloaded from a standard location (a website run by a standards organization) using the encoding-id as a reference. Of course, this can be cached. The decoder can be in different formats, e.g. bytecode, WASM, i3…