[Advocacy] This is a sad day for interoperability in the Web

[Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves]

Today, Adobe Systems Incorporated announced[1] that they will extend
their Flash platform to support the proprietary H.264 and HE-AAC
formats.

The Xiph.Org Foundation has previously contacted Adobe to consider
extending Flash to support the Open Media formats Vorbis, Theora, and
Speex.  Adobe developers replied by stating it would be unwise as it
would increase the file size of the Flash Player, and yet, that is
what will happen now, with the unfair procedure by Adobe to ignore the
backing of our formats by the W3C through SVG and SMIL, by the WHATWG
through HTML 5, and by the XMPP Standards Foundation through Jabber's
Jingle.

There is clearly a need for a non-patented, royalty-free standard for
video and audio on the web.  The Xiph.Org Foundation provided such
standards.  Adobe Systems Incorporated decided to ignore this and back
the use of formats with submarine patents and no clear advantage over
Open Media formats.  Interoperability on the Web?  Nah, screw that.

The Xiph.Org Foundation will continue to provide support for the
corporations who seek to create interoperability on the Web.  We will
not stop the improving process of our formats.

The Xiph.Org Foundation will announce soon the Web Video/Audio
Interoperability Campaign through our Spread Open Media project[2].
This campaign will bring together the community and the browser
developers to speed up support of the <video> and <audio> elements of
HTML 5, as well as the use of SVG and SMIL in order to create an Open
Web.  Be part of such vision.

Adobe Systems Incorporated describes itself as "Adobe revolutionizes
how the world engages with ideas and information -- anytime, anywhere
and through any medium".  We would like to work together with Adobe
Systems Incorporated to reach such goal.  However, we do not agree on
their approach in this issue, and we would like to ask them to
consider their stance.


[1] http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/070821/20070820006124.html?.v=1
[2] http://spreadopenmedia.org/

----
The Xiph.Org Foundation is a non-profit organization that provides a
collection of open source, multimedia-related projects.  It is the
most aggressive effort to put the foundation standards of Internet
audio and video into the public domain, where all Internet standards
belong.