Maybe I missed it, but I don't recall Gruber taking issue with the webM move, in and of itself. I read his posts as just being part of his continued critique of Google's pitching itself and its various business decisions as "open" and/or "good".
I mean that's been the recurring theme on that site re: corporate Google for years now. He's not throwing darts when Google does something in their own best interests. He's throwing darts when Google tries to spin those moves as being moves made in the interests of users, 'open development', free puppies and hugs for everyone, etc.
Yes and he also takes issue when Apple slightly improves a technology that's been available for years and markets it as "revolutionary."
Come on. It's marketing. Too many black kettles and pots to count.
edit: second paragraph of parent post has been slightly edited since I posted this. Originally it only mentioned "open" without users, puppies, and hugs.
And outside of poorly-written movies, the 'bad guys' never think they're bad guys. They always have reasons for what they do, and whether those reasons make sense to us or not, it's enough for them. Likewise, a lot of 'bad guys' lie because they think it's in everyone's best interests. For example, telling the public that there are WMDs in Iraq - it's a lie, but Saddam Hussein is dangerous so we need to lie to people so they'll support us, because otherwise they just won't understand.
I feel the same way about Google. They spend a lot of their time trying to convince people they're the good guys, except that, like any corporation, they're wholly self-serving. I find it less than difficult to imagine them having reasons that make them feel like the good guys, while those reasons would make us feel like they're the bad guys.
In this case, they're trying to cram WebM down everyone's throats, supposedly because it's better for us. They're doing so by removing support for de-facto standards in their browser, and talking up a lot of rhetoric about free and open standards, but what they're really doing is trying to move from a format that a consortium controls to a format that they control. Until they submit WebM to a standards body, I can't believe that this is all for our benefit.
I mean that's been the recurring theme on that site re: corporate Google for years now. He's not throwing darts when Google does something in their own best interests. He's throwing darts when Google tries to spin those moves as being moves made in the interests of users, 'open development', free puppies and hugs for everyone, etc.