[whatwg] The truth about Nokias claims

[Ralph Giles]

On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 03:53:48PM -0500, Jeff McAdams wrote:

> That's why so many standards are so idiotic.  You get standard setting
> bodies like ECMA that pretty much just rubber-stamps something that a
> vendor sends them regardless of the encumbrances of the technologies.
> (witness the OOXML fiasco as an example of how badly the standard
> setting process can be abused)

I think the concern was that Xiph.org might be doing just that.

Being familiar with the people involved, and how the open source process 
works in general I know that's not the case, but from what I understand, 
that's the sense in which the term "proprietary" was used.

> That's why I really don't put much weight on what organizations have
> stamped some arbitrary stamp on a video codec.  I'm much, much more
> concerned with whether its freely and openly implementable.

I agree with you there, having seen open source in action over many 
years, and looking at the history of bodies like the IETF, and what has 
made both the Internet and the WWW so successful. But it seems like 
there's been a lot of yelling over what amounts to "my community didn't 
have input into your process". Which is true as far as it goes, but as 
many others have stated here, the way to make progress is to build an 
interface where we can find common ground between both "ecosystems".

IMHO,
 -r