Broken into two posts since I hit the character limit...
It takes a while to construct these posts, you know!
I know... I was teasing.
So? They still make good money selling their authoring software.
True... but as I said, QuickTime shares the codec with other authoring software, so it isn't like it is exclusive.
But Apple owns QuickTime, and they've invested a lot in the brand. People will naturally gravitate toward their authoring tools, at least if they want to produce QuickTime videos.
I don't use any of Apple's video software, yet I have access to H.264 from the software I use from QuickTime.
Yeah, I know. Codecs aren't tied to any one program. Except I remember when it was a royal pain to get QuickTime videos to play in anything but QuickTime Player--which sucked.
(This is on Windows, mind you, and was about a decade ago.)
The converse is also true about QuickTime in that I (for years) used Sorenson Video 3 for my video (which also isn't supported in the iPhone OS) and is no longer included as a shared encodable codec from QuickTime for other applications.
Sorenson! There's one I haven't heard of in a while.
Apple has a history of betting on how technology will be adopted.
For example, Apple started using 802.11g before it was ratified believing that it would eventually be widely adopted. Apple building in hardware support for H.264 is a similar bet on what technology will be used in the future.
I know Apple likes to stay on the bleeding edge. That's definitely one of their better qualities.
I go back to Microsoft (with you) because you haven't aimed the same venom towards both companies when both have done similar misdeeds. I don't mind discussing Apple's processes (and even failings), but you have been attacking them (and at one time me) because of a personal dislike of Apple (beyond what they have factually done).
Microsoft is pure sleaze. I use their products grudgingly, and go to FOSS alternatives whenever possible. You won't find me defending Microsoft on anything other than the very few areas where they've tried to improve their behavior.
As a non-Apple user who posts in a lot of Apple threads, I find that odd. I don't post in Microsoft or Windows threads as I'm not a Microsoft or Windows user. And a quick search does seem to show you not being very critical of Microsoft in Microsoft threads.
You'll find that my criticism of Apple has far less to do with their technology and much more to do with their business practices.
I don't have to go around being critical of Microsoft because everyone does it for me.
Plus, it's such a broken record to say "Microsoft sucks!" Everybody
knows Microsoft sucks. Very rare is the Microsoft fanboy who laps up everything that comes out of Redmond. At least, not without meeting a lot of ridicule.
Most people view Microsoft as a necessary evil that we wish wasn't necessary at all.
Apple, on the other hand, enjoys this sort of underdog status, and has a very devoted following. There's no shortage of people who think the only way to do things is the "Apple way." It's kind of ironic that Apple is considered the underdog going up against the big boys like Microsoft when their market cap is only about 10% less than MSFT. Apple isn't exactly a small company.
Anyway, what Apple does on their platforms isn't of direct concern to me. Their status as a market leader, in the sense that they are currently driving the major trends in the smartphone market, gives me pause. We basically have two models competing here:
1. The Apple model, which consists of a walled garden where every app is vetted by Apple. Anything not approved by Apple can't be run without jailbreaking your phone.
2. The Android model, which prefers to let the community distribute whatever apps they like, and just provides the infrastructure for them to do so.
For reasons I'm sure you can understand, I prefer model #2, and I don't want #1 to become dominant. If Apple gobbles up the smartphone market and Android loses its mindshare and industry backing, model #1 will likely become the standard. I don't want that to happen.
There was a war of custom tags in the mid 1990s, and the W3C adopted tags that were most widely used (and that was often those designed for IE). Add that in with the fact that Microsoft kept Netscape from running on Windows 95 for as long as they could and paid Apple to make IE the default browser on the Mac, meant that Netscape was at a disadvantage.
Yeah, I remember the custom tag fiasco. Making web pages in the late '90's was so much fun.
Microsoft's behavior was inexcusable and I'm still pissed they weren't nailed to the wall by the DOJ over the whole thing. Just another item I can chalk up to the Bush administration, I guess.
But Netscape bears considerable responsibility, too. I was a loyal Netscape user from version 2.0. When it became "Netscape Communicator" with version 4.0, I started to notice stability issues. It would freeze up and crash occasionally, which was quite rare with 3.0. The last straw was 4.5. Any page with JavaScript or CSS of any complexity would instantly crash the damn thing. Its behavior was so erratic I found it virtually unusable, and switched to IE for a few years. Ugh.
I'm glad the code that was Netscape Navigator got cleaned up and became Mozilla Firefox, which is one of my primary browsers now (along with Chrome.) But the state of Netscape in the 4.x series was atrocious and it's not a coincidence that their market share plummeted around the same time. Microsoft absolutely did their part, too, but Netscape hasted their own fall.
Those were the findings of fact in a court of law, and those findings have never been overturned. Additionally, the internal correspondence showing that this was exactly what Microsoft intended to do was made public in Comes v. Microsoft... I spent three months reading (and watching) the documentation of that case.
This isn't an opinion... this is fact.
Yes, I remember the trial and all the FUD Microsoft's talking heads spewed.
It's a shame they were never punished appropriately. You wouldn't find me shedding any tears if MSFT was broken up into smaller companies.
Just as Apple's motivations have always turned towards hardware, Microsoft's motivations have always turned towards PC platform dominance.
They went after Netscape because Netscape was a deployment platform for Java... Netscape/Java had the potential of making the platform a user was using inconsequential. That frightened Microsoft (they said so themselves) and they were still worried about PC market share even after having wiped out almost all other operating systems by 1995.
I recall Microsoft was forced to remove their own JVM from Windows, too. Their efforts to embrace, extend, and extinguish Java on the desktop were pretty successful.
Today they are not threatened on PCs so control the web isn't as important. But if another OS popped up on PCs that could threaten them, I'm sure they would turn to the same tools that have worked for them in the past.
Hopefully, if they go down that road again, there will be a competent DOJ to go after and punish them.
All of them are derivative of SGML which was an ISO standard that has patents.
SGML has its origins in the '60's, and I cannot find any evidence that any part of the SGML standard is (or ever was) covered by patents. Do you have any links? I'd be curious to see them.
And there is a difference between inclusion and infringement.
Well, I think we need to make a distinction here. The W3C only makes "recommendations" in the form of Web standards. They don't actually implement anything. So, they can't possibly infringe on any patents.
Anyone who tries to implement those standards, of course,
would be liable for any patents covered by the standard.
If there are, then Apple is losing money every time someone downloads QuickTime (and it has been part of QuickTime for years).
That's quite possible. There are absolutely fees involved with distributing the H.264 codec.
Creating and distributing videos encoded with H.264 currently involves no royalties unless such distribution is commercial in nature.
There are also no royalties on streaming H.264 until 2015, as long as you aren't charging subscription fees. What will happen in 2015 is anyone's guess.
My concern for free browsers is that they will be unable to implement <video> tag support in line with the HTML5 spec because you have to obtain a license from MPEG-LA (and pay royalties) to distribute an encoder/decoder.
What about hardware? I don't know. I know that hardware that works with MP3s has to pay a license fee, and as I recall some company claimed to own JPEG and asked for a hardware license fee for cameras and the like that used in (this was back around 1999/2000). I believe there was something like that for PNG as well, which was why IE didn't support it on Windows for almost 10 years. A lot of the things we assume are free actually have fees we never see.
Don't forget CompuServe's patent on the RLE algorithm used in GIF files. The key difference here, though, is that the HTML standards never specified what image formats you should support or have to support.
The web at large is the web at large... as I pointed out, Microsoft has had a larger effect on the web at large than Apple has (or ever could).
I would agree that that's the case
right now, but industry trends point to massive growth in mobile Web usage, which means Apple
is going to have substantial influence over the Web, thanks to the iPhone and iPad.
For example, when I made my first web page, we used extensions like .html, .jpeg, .tiff, etc. When Windows/DOS entered the web, we had to change all our file names to work with the DOS file name limitations of 8.3. They tried to make Java Windows only, and only a couple years ago they were still making code that would exclude browsers like Opera.
You're making me so nostalgic.
I don't think the 8.3 thing is a fair example, though. Sites with pages ending in ".html" still worked in your browser, but obviously you couldn't ever save it with that name on your DOS/Windows 3.x PC.
I do remember Microsoft trying to kill Java by making their own Windows-only JVM and producing a knockoff language (J++). They were slapped down for that and forced to remove the JVM. They gave up on J++, too. Still, we have C#, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Java.
I have no doubt the entire .NET initiative was designed to attack Java.
What code are you talking about that excluded Opera? I've not heard of this.
Apple has very little effect on the web... but as I said before, you are aiming that venom at Apple and excusing Microsoft. Even if Apple wanted to be as bad or worse than Microsoft has been in the last 15 years, Apple has no ability to have that type of effect on the web. Forget motivations, THEY LACK THE ABILITY! Even if Jobs was the anti-Christ, THEY LACK THE ABILITY!
I think that's a myopic view, at best. Apple's mobile platform clout will absolutely have considerable effects on the Web, as more and more people consume the Web through mobile devices.
Your argument fails on the technical aspects of this.
I don't think so. And Apple is more powerful than you think. They're worth almost as much as Microsoft. They aren't the little guys anymore.
On the other hand, I find it funny... comical, that the iPhone has in three years gone from a mobil phone joke to supposedly having control over the industry. In all actuality ALL they have is popularity. They got it in three years, they can lose it in another three years... they have no way to embed themselves into other products out side of their own (because they don't share hardware or software with anyone else).
If Ford came out with an engine for their cars that gave drivers 100 MPG, they aren't damaging other car makers by doing it... even if it became the most popular car ever made.
Might piss off the drivers if they find Ford has put locks into the engine that, if removed, would allow you to get 105 MPG instead, or sacrifice mileage for horsepower. Or, they make such options available, but you can only get them from Ford. In fact, auto manufacturers were busted for that very practice some years ago--making it so you could only get compatible parts from the OEM.
Kudos for making a car analogy in a software discussion, though. It makes me think I'm on Slashdot.
Apple isn't like Microsoft (forcing PC makers to buy a copy of Windows for every PC they make... even if the PC isn't going to run Windows in the end)... Apple makes their own stuff, top to bottom. And for all the antitrust troubles Microsoft has been in for the last 21 years, I've never once heard of anyone complaining because Windows applications don't run on Macs, Linux or UNIX based systems. But apparently iPhone apps are different.
Can you buy a Mac without an OS? Seriously? I wouldn't have even thought it possible! I mean, I can't imagine why anyone would
want to, since the OS is the main attraction. But seriously, you can buy a Mac with no OS?
No one has said iPhone apps "must" run on other platforms. What has been criticized is Apple's recent stance on applications, that any app which calls into the iPhone APIs be written in C/ObjC/C++. No cross-compilers, no multi-platform toolkits, none of that--you must write native iPhone code. It's not that Apple doesn't make it
easy to write cross-platform apps--they have no obligation to do that--but their current position is designed
specifically to preclude cross-platform apps.
Now, you could make a case that compatibility layers and cross-compilers produce inefficient, bloated code. Fair enough. However, this is not necessarily the case, and even if it is, the app can be rejected on that basis. But to preclude cross-platform development just to spite Adobe is asinine.
I had stopped talking about HTML5 and moved to talking about the iPhone application environment... and both you guys seemed to have thought I was still talking about HTML5.
Apple has no control, shouldn't have any control, and will never have any control over W3C affairs.
Period.
We've talked about multiple things here!
