What would cost millions of dollars? Please cut the drama out already and limit yourself to arguments. You're finally starting to display understanding of the patent clause.
Companies wouldn't adopt things under "GPLv3", but they wouldn't a permit GPLv2 either. Or LPGL. Or Apache 2. Or MIT, or BSD, or any license. They permit nothing short of contributors assigning them copyright and the patents, just them (see eg. Webkit's and Chromium's copyright notices and CLAs). And yet, libpng is under a license. So yeah, I agree they'd write their own library - out of their selfishness. Let them.
With the "adopting a web standard" thing you're attempting to further move goal posts. But you fail, and not because your implication that standard bodies would accept permissive licenses is wrong - which it is, because they're exclusively public domain + patent clause (oh and the people building browsers still contribute somehow). You fail because you're mixing apples and oranges again; programs are not parts of standards. Standards describe file formats, and prescribe behavior of programs that process them. They are not concerned with implementations' licenses.
The spec can become a public domain standard, and all would still be well with the library under (L)GPLv3+. Free software should have the edge.
I view the standards process as an ending remark. Browsers should innovate in as many directions as possible, while keeping the technology patent free so others can copy them if need be.
Then a standards body can cement the innovation into a standard that everyone has to implement.
That said, I don't see how this particular innovation is any different from say a Firefox plugin. Yes, its proprietary to a single browser but can we argue then that if Firefox took the majority share on the web, we'd have to worry about people copying their plugin structure just to stay relevant?
I agree with what you are saying in the beginning - We definitely need a proper standard and not a single company having design control. I am not so much defending the way Google is going about it, but rather the value of something which plays the essentially same role.
Ideally, I would like the web developer to have as much freedom as a developer for a native application - the freedom to choose a programming language and the ability to compile to a reasonably low level target for performance while still being cross-platform. Now, this somehow needs to be done without the security nightmares of ActiveX plugins. (Though, I dont see the non-security problems with a bunch of shared libraries stored on the browser. This is essentially what the OS does, and my goal is to replace the OS with the browser. Bandwidth will probably improve so that downloading libraries shouldn't be a problem and if not, the web site maintainer can still choose not to develop in a large library environment The popular ones will be cached in any case.)
You seem to be saying that the technical difficulties of doing this in a well-specified (memory and control-flow), secure and cross-platform way are intractable. Maybe this can be solved by moving the VM to a more abstract level.
The dream of the modern web is the concept of a single standard/platform that is used for all user facing software. This is a flawed idea and this article demonstrates one of the biggest reasons for that. By definition, features only become part of open web standards if all the main players agree to them. All the players have financial and political incentives to block various things. Corporations can block something that you want to use even though you have no relationship with that corporation. In a capitalist system you have very little leverage against a corporation that you have no financial relationship with. What are you going to do: stop buying the [Apple/Google/Microsoft] products that you already don't use? What's left is people writing angry impotent blog posts against companies that don't care about them in the least.
The list of proposed standards that have been blocked/delayed by one of more of the big browsers is huge. Blocking proposed standards isn't uncommon, if anything it's the norm. mathml, websql, pointer events, h264 video, nacl, flexbox, webgl, jpeg2000, webm, mp3, ogg vorbis, theora, webp etc etc.
Because of its origins as a way of displaying untrusted documents the web has no 'escape hatch'. It's a very tight sandbox. Flash and Java used to fulfil that role but they are on the way out. The web has a very basic trust model - all pages are untrusted and there is no other level of trust available. So if what you want to do hasn't been blessed by all the browser vendors then you are screwed. Does one of the main browser vendors compete with your product? It's quite likely that they do. Yet you want to give them full control over how your code can run all on all users machines?
If you don't like the idea of a corporation being able to veto a web standard then you need to seriously ask yourself if you actually like the idea of open web standards at all. Political vetoing is integral to the idea of open standards created through consensus and it isn't going to go away no matter how much people fantasise about it.
Sure but it's the non-standard part that matters. If they keep going like this and get mass adoption the web will end up defined as "whatever Google puts in chrome", which will presumably be chosen to maximize their own interests.
The fact that other people could copy them (assuming what Google chooses is a good design for others too) doesn't make it into an open process.
For example, the PNG standard still isn't fully supported by Internet Explorer. Who knows what could have been different if the early standard were open and extensible (without patent difficulties)..
Web standards are hideously complicated to implement, and browsers are hideously difficult to charge for. That doesn't make for a viable business.
Unless they become a volunteer based effort -- which is unlikely, given the hideous complexity of implementing web standards -- they don't have a way to fund things.
This is why I've repeatedly spoken against the unapproachable complexity of web standards. They effectively turn the web into a corporate walled garden for megacorporations, because they're too complicated to implement affordably.
So you'd rather give up on the open web and turn it into a proprietary system? Just for a seamless experience? Sorry to say this. But that's just plain stupid.
The web is not proprietary, not an app, and only to some extend controlled by the w3c, which is much more than Microsoft, Google, and Apple.
Those examples are the demonstration of my point! You had a mostly fixed standard that a small team could hope to reach - the W3C stuff - and the few top browser vendors decided to extend that with a continuous stream of new features chosen only by them - the WHATWG -, with the result that browsers who couldn't keep up got extinguished from the market.
That the features aren't proprietary is besides the point: Google realizes that they don't need them to be proprietary, what matters is that others can't easily implement them all.
This news sounds great to me, but I feel like I don't understand what's happening behind the curtain and don't grasp the second-order consequences. What would motivate them? I wonder what the political motives are (industry politics, not the other kind that we won't mention here).
Could this eventually displace standards bodies such as WHATWG and W3C? If the Product Advisory Board of Mozilla, Google, and Samsung agree on a standard and publish it at MDN, will that become as official, at least de facto, as a standard published by W3C? I do see W3C is mentioned as a participant.
Also, for the sake of argument (and IMHO, of realism) let's assume that Google, who can virtually set web standards themselves these days, isn't doing this for a purely altruistic motive of supporting the open web. Why would they give up the 'soft power' of writing their own documentation for their own standards?
Except Google began using it immediately and did so for years before the patents were disclosed, and the w3c abandoned the standard prior to even asking about royalties. I think the w3c is at fault for the fracture in the standards more than anyone else. It's my understanding that Apple holds patents on the canvas standards that they do not require royalties for as well
'Once it's standardized' is a chicken and egg statement - since to be standardized can only happen if other parties get on board. If nobody does, Google can say 'well we tried', whether or not they made any serious attempt to involve others in the process (which thus far it would apper they have not).
The fact that others could try to make their own competitors is an exact description of the situation where the web breaks down in favor of proprietary solutions and the strongest companies end up owning the web.
I don't think web standards work that way. Often times we'll see things get deployed and implemented before they become standards anyway. And it's not as if W3C has any authority. But even if W3C had any authority, Google and Apple would just pay off every seat.
The web lost track after the dotcom. In the beginning there were protocols. Now we're in the corporate moat period, where N corporations build the same thing N times because each one of them wants to dominate the others. Consequently, we were left with low-level protocols and languages (http, html, css, etc); there is no standard for buying shit online, despite most businesses being online. No standard for payments, no standard for query/search/browsing, etc. Compare that with, e.g., computer graphics, where graphics vendors (except Apple) collaborate on the development of standards like OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenXR, and shit works relatively seamlessly modulo vendor bugs and extensions.
There's certainly other models. Not sure if they are better or worse. There's the W3C model. I don't even know what that is honestly as although they help propose standards much of what they do is document what browser vendors have implemented after the fact and then try to get the browser vendors to agree. I don't know what their funding model is
The Khronos Group (OpenGL, OpenCL, etc) is a pay to participate organization but they make their specs public.
My point is only that even if ANSI, which others have brought up, needs money their model of charging for the specs isn't the only way to do it.
As for the original article it certainly does seem outrageous that there are laws that require you to follow some standard and you have to pay to access that standard.
What about all those other companies not being Google, Apple and Microsoft?
Do they not get a 'significant say in the standardization process' because they don't have a web browser? And if not why should those who have a web browser get a say? Much less a significant one? The only way this matters is if you extend the capabilities of your browser outside the standards process. So if everybody would follow the standard then that wouldn't be a problem.
No more Microsoft sites that only work with IE (remember Active-X/COM objects?) no more Google using features that are only present in Chrome to cripple Google docs on Firefox.
For a feature to not be proprietary in the modern browser landscape, it has to have multiple parties able to participate in the design. Including the core design decisions of "should we use JS as a basis" (the consensus solution) vs. "should we use LLVM as a basis" (the PNaCl solution).
First, it is simply not true that the standardized parts of the web have been fully open. There have been scores of proprietary features, including those with no source availability or even documentation, that have become web standards because browser vendors built or reverse engineered them and web developers used them.
Standardization is a good thing, but you're being a bit selective claiming web standards have always been open and source available. It doesn't always happen that way. It didn't happen that way for image codecs, for example.
Second, plug-ins most certainly are and have been a Web standard.
NPAPI was implemented in multiple browsers from multiple different vendors and has been used by dozens of major software companies and thousands of lesser companies, commercial and open source, for browser integrated features.
That you don't consider de facto standards to be standards doesn't mean they aren't.
Companies wouldn't adopt things under "GPLv3", but they wouldn't a permit GPLv2 either. Or LPGL. Or Apache 2. Or MIT, or BSD, or any license. They permit nothing short of contributors assigning them copyright and the patents, just them (see eg. Webkit's and Chromium's copyright notices and CLAs). And yet, libpng is under a license. So yeah, I agree they'd write their own library - out of their selfishness. Let them.
With the "adopting a web standard" thing you're attempting to further move goal posts. But you fail, and not because your implication that standard bodies would accept permissive licenses is wrong - which it is, because they're exclusively public domain + patent clause (oh and the people building browsers still contribute somehow). You fail because you're mixing apples and oranges again; programs are not parts of standards. Standards describe file formats, and prescribe behavior of programs that process them. They are not concerned with implementations' licenses.
The spec can become a public domain standard, and all would still be well with the library under (L)GPLv3+. Free software should have the edge.
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