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Is VP8 open source?

By Sean Michael Kerner on May 25, 2010 9:32 AM
webm.png
From the 'Open Source Rules' files:

One of the big pieces of news out of the Google I/O conference last week was the open sourcing of the VP8 video codec.

With VP8, the promise from Google is a video codec on par with H.264 that will be available royalty-free. It's a good idea, but there might be a problem.

The license that Google has chosen for VP8 isn't technically an approved license from the OSI (Open Source Initiative), the group that decides what is and what isn't a bona fide open source license.  At least that's the view of former Sun Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps.

The actual license that Google is using hasn't been submitted and approved by the OSI, which is the big issue. At it's core, as far as I can tell in my own personal opinion, the VP8 license should be considered open source in spirit, if not Open Source by definition. Google is making the code available and making a royalty patent license to any user. On the surface that looks to me to be as good as what the Theora codec is currently providing.

Also going a step further, the Free Software Foundation, a group that is about Free Software (not necessarily the same as Open Source), has endorsed VP8.
"The Free Software Foundation supports the adoption of WebM and calls upon all browser developers to support WebM and Ogg, much like Mozilla and Google are already doing with Firefox and Chromium," the FSF said in a statement.
Semantics of the technicalities of open source licensing aside, I don't think anyone would argue that VP8 isn't a better option for open source users than H.264 -- which isn't open by any definition. I also don't think that concerns about whether it's an actual open source license or not will restrict adoption (much if at all).

Sure it would be better if there were not patent or license concerns at all, but as was the case with the Mozilla Public License plus Attribution that was popular for a while (and wasn't bona fide open source either), this is an issue that will eventually go away.

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1 Comments

MOGH said:

What ?

The "actual license" is the BSD (more or less).
BSD software examples are many, Postgresql for one. Postgresql is open source because you get the source code with every download.

May 25, 2010 7:49 PM

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