Not necessarily.

We now have Opus, another free codec (with its own IPR issues).

And there’s Daala, with the soul attempt of being totally free. And VP9 – where the company in question wants to make it free. It isn’t the same people and their respective companies have different business models.

I understand your point, but the companies that will work on any of these free codecs are the same ones that contribute to H.264 and H.265. If they wanted, they could make H.265 royalty free. I think everyone would agree that’s good for the industry. However, too many companies, for whatever reason, have always been protective of IPR on both voice and video coding.

Paul,

Two things here. The first one, a two axis diagram can never have the complexity of real world in it, so yes, it is missing pieces of reality.

The second one is more important – I care more about what VP8 stands for than nuances of who still holds patents to it and can threaten the buiding ecosystem. At the end of the day, VPx puts us as an industry on a track towards free codecs instead of royalty bearing ones – and that’s a good thing, assuming it can come to fruition.

If Google wants to claim it is free, they should indemnify users against patent claims. They won’t, though, because they know there is a huge risk.