HAL must die!

[David Brodbeck]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 11:09 AM, Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> wrote:
> It's certainly true that video is a bit of a "sticky widget" with regard
> to open standards.  The moment someone develops something that is
> verifiably free of patent encumbrances for video and doesn't just *suck*,
> I expect that either it will achieve escape velocity in mere moments to
> become the most widely deployed type of video in the world, or the guy
> who created it will die under mysterious circumstances and his heirs will
> somehow arrange to dummy up a patent application in his name with the
> help of whoever's going to buy the patent from those heirs.

The problem is it'd have to be someone who's unemployed. ;)  Any
software company is going to want to patent something that valuable;
they'd be failing their shareholders if they didn't.

We may just have to wait for the patents to expire on some older but
still viable codecs, much like eventually happened with GIF.