Re: Alternative decision process in RTCWeb

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 7:04 AM, Dave Cridland <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 2:40 PM, Dave Crocker <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>> BTW, as distasteful as it might be, is there a reason that making /both/
>> MTI would not work?
>
>
> Speaking as a third party to this, so I may have misinterpreted, then yes.
> My (possibly simplistic and/or plain wrong) summary follows:
>
> The problem appears to be largely driven by actual IPR issues surrounding
> H.264, though it has strong hardware support particularly within the
> incumbent VOIP market players.
>
> My impression is that VP8 is largely (though not entirely) thought to be
> free from IPR headaches, but lacks the hardware support that is baked into
> the market. [I have seen exchanges suggesting that other people suspect VP8
> of having IPR issues, but nobody I've seen in the posts I've reviewed has
> claimed that position for themselves, so it's not clear to me how IPR-free
> it's really perceived]
>
> It's possible to make H.264 an MTI only if you're willing to ignore the
> "true" open-source browsers (by which I mean IceWeasel rather than Firefox,
> and Chromium rather than Chrome) - Cisco have somewhat mitigated the IPR
> issues with their OpenH264 effort, though the precise licensing details
> don't align fully with open source, and it's clear they will cause
> significant headaches to at least some parties.

Dave,

It's actually not clear to me why IceWeasel and Chromium can't use OpenH264
in exactly the same way that Firefox can, i.e., by doing download from Cisco's
site. I appreciate that people may have philosophical objections to doing
this, but I haven't actually heard any reason why this is a practical problem
as opposed to a philosophical one. This isn't to say that there aren't
situations
in which a downloaded module doesn't work, but I don't see that those are
any different for Chromium or IceWeasel then they are for Firefox.
(And

As a side note, the relationship between the Firefox binaries distributed by
Mozilla and the Firefox source isn't quite the same as between Chromium
and Chrome. The Firefox that is distributed by Mozilla is basically the same
as that you would get if you compiled the source yourself. By contrast, Chrome
contains a bunch of extra bits that are not in Chromium (e.g., Flash).

-Ekr