[ Thanks to James
Maguire for this link. ]
“Is Steve Jobs at it again? Just days after reaffirming
Apple’s decision to ban Adobe’s Flash from the iPhone, the
company’s CEO is reportedly pointing the finger at another
multimedia technology he sees struggling with major shortcomings —
echoing similar comments, as it turns out, from Apple’s longtime
archrival, Microsoft.“Hugo Roy, the French coordinator of Free Software Foundation
Europe, said he had sent Jobs an e-mail partly to applaud Apple’s
commitment to Web standards that Jobs had outlined in his Thoughts
on Flash essay. But according to Roy, a prominent European open
source advocate, Jobs responded specifically to another part of the
e-mail, where Roy had suggested Apple should support open source
video codec (coder/decoder) formats like Theora instead of H.264,
which requires licensing fees.“Instead, Jobs suggests in his e-mailed response that the
backers of these video codecs may have reason to worry.“”All video codecs are covered by patents,” Jobs said in the
e-mail, according to Roy. “A patent pool is being assembled to go
after Theora and other ‘open source’ codecs now. Unfortunately,
just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee
that it doesn’t infringe on others’ patents. An open standard is
different from being royalty free or open source.””