It reaks of control, greed, unprincipled market leaders shooting each other, regardless of violating the principles they claim to stand on….freedom, openness, using open source as a means for success.

Watch out…the open source world is undergoing a civil war. Wow. Job security for lawyers. Maybe all Americans should be lawyers so we can take turns suing each other. Yeah! What a way to do business.

Who needs enemies….world leaders watch as American companies sue each other to death. Who needs TV? Lets see, Oracle gets rich using open source…Google gets rich using open source….Apple gets rich on a customized BSD variant of Unix…now they shoot each other……..or so we think……..the plot thickens.

Tune in tomorrow for the next episode of greed and deceit, where we find out that all these companies are really friends — milking the people in the form of a “digital tax”.

There’s been a big hoopla about what the next worldwide video codec is going to be, and Apple has bet the farm on the H.264 video codec.  Which video codec will win out? Why does that matter?  I believe it boils down to money.

Define Codec

First of all, lets define codec = [ A codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding and/or decoding a digital data stream or signal. ]  When making a video, the content is encoded using certain algorithms to compress the file down to a reasonable size while hopefully retaining the best quality possible. The opposite happens when you want to play the video, it is then decoded– co  dec  = encode / decode.

To Make a Codec

The codec is first designed and financed by some, one, or many, and then sets out to become the next worldwide standard.  Once the video codec is accepted as “the standard”, the group that is responsible for it,  then Patent’s it.  After the patent is complete, they can charge license or royalty fees to recoup their cost in making it. $$

To Make a Buck

The current worldwide standard video codec, the H.264 codec, is currently licensed by the MPEG-LA, a Denver-based firm that licenses patent pools.  Microsoft and Apple are among the many members of the MPEG-LA. The MPEG-LA charges royalties to companies that make products which encode and/or decode using their codec. The firm also charges royalties to companies which sell content that was encoded using their patents — the person who sells the encoder and the person who sells the content are the ones who have to pay.  For example, if Mozilla Firefox were to ship an H.264 decoder with their web browser, they would have to pay approximately $5 million a year. [4] Imagine what YouTube (Google) and Adobe have to pay in royalties.

To Save a Buck

Google recently purchased a video codec software company called On2 Technologies for $124.6 million.  Not long after Google’s purchase they gave the software to the world–making it open source–free. [5] Immediately they announced their switch to using the new codec to encode all of their video’s on YouTube, as well as a new web video project called webM. The webM projects goal is to provide a royalty free video codec for use on the Internet.  Adobe immediately embraced Google’s new codec and are incorporating it into their video products–including Flash. [6]

Gee. I wonder how long Apple knew about this before it became public knowledge? Just before Google’s move became public knowledge, Steve Jobs made several attempts to stamp out his foes.

Empire Strikes Back

As soon as Google offered up the new codec, the MPEG-LA announced their intent to include it into their “Patent Pool”. This might mean that the new codec, offered to the world freely by Google, will possibly require royalties. [7] Who would the royalties be paid to?  The MPEG-LA, of course.

The Vision

Google, as well as the rest of the world’s consumers, would like to have an open, royalty free codec to incorporate into the newly revised HTML standard–otherwise known as HTML-5.  The new standard in HTML, HTML-5′s goal is to allow web developers to directly embed video in a website using the new <video> tag. Without royalties, companies, including Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and versions of Linux would be  able to include a standard video codec into their software. This would free up the Internet by creating a universally standard video codec, and allow development to explode.

If you think ahead in terms of generations and you apply that to software, then you may wonder–where are we headed? Is there a future beyond tomorrow? Have you thought about all of the documents that you’ve typed and collected? What about the sounds, videos, images, papers, etc…? And what if you are a college, a business, a city, or a nation. How many digital documents are people generating today? You should already know–a lot.

“In 2006, 161 exabytes of digital information were created and copied” [DSS Resources.com]

How do we know our digital files will be available for the future to view?  We don’t. Unless, of course we can count on the companies that make our documents–like Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, etc., and only hope they’ll be around in the future. Talk about job security. The more documents that are created using Microsoft products, the more job security for Microsoft. But what about your documents? Are they your documents? Or are they Microsoft’s? Thankfully there’s open source software like OpenOffice that will render Microsoft documents today (2010).

Ok. Toyota (Japan) has a great big chunk of the worlds vehicle market…Microsoft (U.S.) has a large chunk of the document market. This presents a problem for colleges and/or nations that are looking to archive their digital content for future generations. Many are tackling this dilemma right now. Just “Google” (or “Bing” or “Yahoo” if you prefer) the phrase [digital archiving] and you’ll see what I mean. After reading several of the research papers available through the Internet, you’ll find that a large part of the group are turning to open source software to meet their digital document needs. Not only are governments, but universities are using open source software as a way to ensure their documents remain open and not proprietary today and into the future. They say that with open source software they can, if all else fails, write their own custom rendering software, which is free from royalties and or tied to any particular vendor. It makes sense to me. Among other things, they’re saving money. After all, why would the U.S. government be one of Microsoft’s Enterprise customers anyway? To provide for the common defense? Absolutely. If you work for Microsoft. And look who’s on the board at Apple–Al Gore (as of this date).

To ensure the most flexibility, I think future generations should only rely on open standards that don’t depend on any particular vendor (or be vendor neutral). There are so many documents….will someone be able to read them in the future?

Believe me, I only use MS Windows because I’m forced to. Linux isn’t perfect, but it can be practical for any use, i.e. Server, Desktop, etc…

Need to save money?  Tired of  expensive updates? –try Linux.

Isn’t it great how our society gets creative and invents things? Then after we create it we don’t want anyone else to make it better?

Apple seems to be the epitome of this. Their IPhone and IPad have their limitations, for example, they can’t run more than one application at a time, but Google and others have set out to make mobile phones better–more open. What do you think Apple did when Google came out with the Android OS?  They’re suing them, of course.

Apple wants to stand alone in a proprietary world…against all competitors. That’s fine, until they begin trying to “control” the spirit of ingenuity. I think their greed and ugliness will ultimately end up having a negative impact on their bottom line.

If companies can patent anything– like speech, walking, touching, etc –  then I guess everyone must learn how to walk and talk differently. Maybe someone will patent the alphabet and we’ll have to make a new one. What Progress.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/02/apple-vs-htc-a-patent-breakdown/

Why shouldn’t the Operating System be a given for any computer architecture? I suggest that we should only have to pay for new computer hardware and some utility applications–not the Operating System. Since the idea of Open Source has been thoroughly proven and tested with software like Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Open Office, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc., future generations may see a day when Operating Systems are provided without cost. If you think about it, Google is using our search patterns as a marketing tool, as well as placing advertisements in well thought out schemes. Microsoft is now joining the scheme too.

How do you like the fact that your software tracks your habbits, what sites you’ve been to, what searches you’ve made, what hardware you’ve installed, etc…Now if I can track your search patterns, and I have a monopoly over the search results, I can provide the results (with advertisements) as I see fit. I won’t go into all of the problems with this, for example heavily biased, possibly unreliable search data. But since Microsoft and Google are tracking this type of data anyway, they can use the profits from this alone to fund their software enterprises. Google has proven it already.

If you want to reduce the cost of technology upgrades, just make all Operating Systems free.

If all Operating Systems were free, which one would you choose?

Syntax:  sc delete Servicename

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/251192

Ted Patrick writes about their bumpy experience getting 295 sessions posted.

I think the proprietary OS makers (Microsoft and Apple) actually like the open source markets because they see them as a testing ground–once the new thing is tested and well received–they assimilate the feature into their retail products. It’s free R & D.

Looking at this from a consumer and a programmer’s perspective, what would the advantages be if we had a universal operating system?

For the consumer, having a universal operating system may have several benefits. Things like better mobility (software freedom), application availability, greater security, and an improved ability to archive documents for future use. For the programmer, besides having a wider reach and/or customer base, having a universal operating system may also make things easier to program and ultimately end up in better programs. This sums up my theory, but first let’s take a look at things from a consumer’s perspective.

For the consumer, wouldn’t it be nice to buy an application that worked on ANY platform? I mean if I pay full retail price for an application shouldn’t that application work on any computer? Ideally–I think it should. This would give the consumer more choices as to “where” we could install our software–which leads to having greater mobility from the software’s perspective. What about the availability of your applications?

In addition to having greater flexibility as to “where” we could install our software, there would undoubtedly be more applications available for the consumer due to the number of programmers focusing on a single Application Programming Interface (API)–programming code. And what about the security of the applications?

With the world of programmers focusing on a singular API, wouldn’t you expect the security of applications to be improved? If all of the world’s resources were focused on creating the most secure operating system, providing us a foundation on which to run our applications, we might actually do it. Imagine an operating system that isn’t “hackable”, but instead secured from all the applications and/ or processes that are running in the background. The applications would run in a “sandbox” and be kept securely away from reeking havoc on a users hard drive. After all, that really is the noble goal of operating system designers–providing security… stability… and simplicity (SSS). Although these three things are relatively available in our operating systems today, usually one of these suffers at the expense of the other. I mean usually in the effort to provide application stability, security might increase, but all of this could be at the expense of simplicity.

If all of the world’s resources were focused on a single API we might actually have more open standards, and then we could begin thinking about more important things like long-term digital storage for the benefit of society. If you think about it, most of the software in today’s offices produce a unique file format–which is useless unless you have the correct viewing application. With proprietary software dominating the market, a universal archival format becomes less and less realistic. For one reason, the major driving factor of any business is to “stay in business”. That focus seems to be less on consumer’s needs, and more on achieving the bottom line–$$$. On the other hand, open source software–created using open standards–offers a much more realistic opportunity of producing a long-term universal archival format. Using open standards along with open source software allows a society to build quality software for any need at any time. In contrast to this, using proprietary locked source software, a society must exchange large sums of money in order to fill a temporary need. Since they are receiving only more locked source software, the consumer builds a recurring dependency on the proprietary vendor–which leads to job security for the vendor. Let’s face it, this is the information age. Our entire world history will eventually be stored in some form of digital repository. The whole idea of storing information into central repositories stems from the desire to save time by preventing someone from having to “re-create the wheel”, so to speak. In other words, having the information right at our fingertips allows us to efficiently build onto the existing body of knowledge. Our society should consider how future generations will retrieve the data we archive today. And this means we need to determine what type of file format(s) we are going to use for archiving.

So with only one operating system to focus on, consumers should see better software mobility, more applications available, greater security, and possibly better archival options for long-term use. Now what advantages would a universal operating system have for the programmer?

First of all, a single operating system that runs on any hardware and allows a programmer to focus on one API would make the learning curve much easier. Being able to focus on one API would allow greater concentration of effort–getting tasks done instead of spending brain cycles figuring out what type of hardware I’m using, or what operating system I’m running on.

In addition to making things easier for the programmer, wouldn’t the applications actually be more universal? Today we have several different operating systems to tailor our applications for, so what do programmers usually do? They tailor their application to run on only one of the available platforms, thereby forcing operating system lock-in and reducing the software’s mobility. After having paid retail price for a software product, the consumer has limited choices as to “where” they can install it. On the other hand, if they have a universal operating system, the application can be installed on ANY computer. This gives the programmer a greater market reach–more devices to install it on–and this is universal. But if there was one universal operating system, would the quality of software suffer? I think the software would actually improve.

I think a universal operating system would provide better structure and ultimately a higher quality of application? If the world’s programmers were focused on a single API you could expect better quality in terms of stability, security, and simplicity. For example, with only one API to learn, the number of people exceptionally familiar with it would be high because the knowledge would regularly transfer from expert to novice to beginner. This regular transfer of knowledge would make the underlying knowledgebase higher, and by means of peer reviews, might make the applications better.

So in conclusion, it seems to me that a universal operating system may provide many advantages to both consumers and programmers. What do you think?