In many areas, engineers need to get paid to innovate. Dating back to at least the standardization of CD-ROM, that was mediated through the use of patents. Note that until recently, there was almost no open source development of media codecs.
Today, there is an advertising and entertainment industry generating huge surpluses that can also bankroll engineers to develop codecs. I’m not convinced that this is a better model.
Hi. I have personally been developing open source media codecs for 20 years. I've had a lot of help from other open source developers.
I have been paid by Mozilla to do this in some capacity for a decade. The budget for our entire team (which is the largest it has ever been), is less than the cost for just Mozilla to license H.264, by a non-trivial margin.
Here are some of the things that team has done:
- Made a Theora (VP3) encoder easily superior (in quality/bit) to what Youtube was shipping in Flash at the time (VP6), and (favorably) comparable with H.264 baseline.
- Developed and standardized the Opus audio codec.
- Provided infrastructure and maintainence for Xiph's older codecs (Vorbis, Speex, FLAC, etc.).
- Provided some minor assistance to VP8 and VP9 development.
- Made a from-scratch video codec (Daala) competitive with HEVC while avoiding the patents (i.e., with one hand tied behind our backs).
- Made significant contributions to a video codec superior to HEVC (AV1).
Now, maybe you want to call all of that almost nothing, but this code is in every Apple and Android handset in existence, and every current desktop browser, and used by some of the largest websites in the world (Youtube, Wikipedia).
The major concern with open source development is the free rider problem: why should Media Company X spend resources on an open source codec when Google will build one for them?
But the value current patent holders are attempting to extract from an individual licensee is larger than the cost for them to develop the technology from scratch by themselves. That value isn't created by the technology. It's created by having a common standard. And we don't need patents to incentivize that.
And it was under development all the back to 1993 or 1998 depending on your opinion. Including image codecs, PNG was 1996. For video codecs, Huffyuv was 2000. (Though to be fair lossless codecs are relatively easier to create, which is why there’s an unnecessarily large variety of them.)
And even lossy video codecs had some OSS experimental developments in the early 2000s that admittedly never went too far - Tarkin predates VP3 open sourcing if you want to count that, and Snow got somewhat decent results if you ignore that H.264 predates it.
Ogg Tarkin predates Theora and tried some completely new ideas in a time when digital video wasn't as ubiquitous (and so there wasn't as much incentive to keep going when problems arose).
Tarkin also suffered from the patent minefield everybody else put up (so they couldn't go for the obvious solutions because these were already locked down for another 15 years)
> In many areas, engineers need to get paid to innovate.
What do you think: How many engineers can be paid for reducing Netflix's traffic by 10% simply by these lowered traffic costs, and not counting secondary effects as a larger user base because more people can watch the videos with their available bandwidth? Also YouTube, Amazon Video, public television, ...
Today, there is an advertising and entertainment industry generating huge surpluses that can also bankroll engineers to develop codecs. I’m not convinced that this is a better model.