There's no real guarantee that Daala won't be covered, at least partially by some submarine patents. I don't think you can work on a years long R&D effort and make that promise.
IMHO, you work on stuff with the assumption that if you're a big success, someone's gonna sue you, and plan for it accordingly.
In the meantime, HEVC is going to be widely deployed eventually. VP8 and VP9 are valid alternatives for some, and I see no reason not to support them while we wait years for a moonshot codec to save us. I have to wonder if there isn't some NIH fear that if VP8/9 get any degree of success it would make it that much harder to switch to Daala later.
That is, it's better to keep things in a "bad" state (H264/HEVC) because as the situation gets worse, it would be easier to justify Daala adoption later. Similar to how if you're waiting for Healthcare reform, and you want Single Payer, supporting a partial solution (e.g. health exchanges) might mitigate the worst pain, and make it harder to argue for Single Payer later.
> I have to wonder if there isn't some NIH fear that if VP8/9 get any degree of success it would make it that much harder to switch to Daala later.
As the person who
A) leads the Daala project, and
B) made the decision to ship VP9 (a conversation that went approximately like this: My Boss: "Should we support VP9 in Firefox?" Me: "Yes. Duh."), and
C) has been fighting hard to make VP8 Mandatory To Implement for WebRTC...
I can tell you that nothing would make me happier than to see VP8 and VP9 be wildly successful. Hell, I'd've been ecstatic if we'd successfully managed to get H.264 Baseline made RF (there was an effort to do so a couple of years ago: it failed by 2 votes). See also OpenH264.
I disagree. Most people need the choice first to see that change is possible. They don't go out of their ways to make those choices. That's the harder alternative.
I think the people behind it know it might fail miserably, but they also believe it's a risk worth taking, and a worthy endeavor.
IMHO, you work on stuff with the assumption that if you're a big success, someone's gonna sue you, and plan for it accordingly.
In the meantime, HEVC is going to be widely deployed eventually. VP8 and VP9 are valid alternatives for some, and I see no reason not to support them while we wait years for a moonshot codec to save us. I have to wonder if there isn't some NIH fear that if VP8/9 get any degree of success it would make it that much harder to switch to Daala later.
That is, it's better to keep things in a "bad" state (H264/HEVC) because as the situation gets worse, it would be easier to justify Daala adoption later. Similar to how if you're waiting for Healthcare reform, and you want Single Payer, supporting a partial solution (e.g. health exchanges) might mitigate the worst pain, and make it harder to argue for Single Payer later.