

'Open' has very little to do with anything Google does - FlorianMueller
http://www.marco.org/2013/03/09/google-webm-infringement

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lake99
What a moronic little rant! And big surprise, it was posted by Florian
Mueller.

Everything in modern technology infringes patents. When building some machines
a few years ago, just out of curiosity, I looked up patents on motor control.
Things that have been standard practice in the industry, and are described in
30-year old text books, had been patented just the year before I looked them
up.

Those who support patents for software and electronics are the worst kind of
bottom feeders.

So, Google "infringed" some patents. Boo f#$%^&g hoo!

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charleslmunger
Actually, this is exactly what "open" means. Google's main competitors are
Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple.

Facebook has a good track record of contributing open source projects,
(Cassandra, for example), but an arguably poor track record on openness of
user data (see Vine).

Apple is tied with Microsoft for the least open company on this list. While
they have a few great open source projects (like clang and webkit) iOS is a
completely closed system, and their devices are closed hardware.

Amazon is a very open company, allowing other people to use components of its
stack and hardware.

Microsoft is a patent bully, and windows phone/RT is just as closed as iOS.

Google, by comparison, open sources tons of software, from internal libraries
(Guava, Guice, Gson) to entire platforms (Android, ChromeOS, Chromium). They
also open protocols and standards such as VP8 and SPDY. They publish papers in
conferences and give talks on how their company operates.

Google certainly isn't as open as it could be, but saying that "Open has very
little to do with anything Google does" is clearly false.

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digitalzombie
No worries, I crossed Google off my check list a long time ago as a "good"
company.

Once they went public with stocks, they went evil.

Agreeing with companies to not poach programmers, buying start up and shutting
their services down, etc...

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niggler
Reminiscent of the github argument that everything but the secret sauce should
be open sourced: [http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-
everyth...](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-
everything.html)

Of course, they are also saying what is convenient for them.

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greenyoda
Link to original article:

Google admits its VP8/WebM codec infringes MPEG H.264 patents

[http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/03/07/google-admits-
its-...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/03/07/google-admits-its-vp8webm-
codec-infringes-mpeg-h264-patents)

