Jon Simpson
FSF Open letter to Google: free VP8, and use it on YouTube
With your purchase of On2, you now own both the world’s largest video site (YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec – VP8. Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube.
This would make a world of difference to the HTML5 video element, where the polar stance Firefox (Theora-only) has taken against the commercial browsers Chrome (Theora/H264), Safari (H264-only) in codec support is significantly impacting the utility of the <video> tag. Google has the power with YouTube and Chrome to really push an open standard instead of H264.