[MPlayer-dev-eng] matroska container sold to IBM

[D Richard Felker III]

On Tue, Apr 01, 2003 at 09:59:35PM +0200, Christian HJ Wiesner wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> i have some great news to spread today, and i am indeed extremely happy 
> that i have the honour of doing so :
> 
> The matroska project, including all source code and the main 
> specification, by signed contract dated 31st March 2003, was sold to the 
> International Bussiness Machine Corporation ( IBM ), New Orchard Road, 
> Armonk, NY 10504, USA. . My thanks goes to Dan 'Metaboy' Marlin from the 
> Corecodec team for making the initial contact, Dan, without you this 
> would have not been possible.
> 
> IBM will convert the matroska project and all libraries into a closed 
> source format, but make the binaries of the library publically available 
> for non-commercial usage, together with an API to be able to read/write 
> matroska files from all applications on different OSes. An  arrangement 
> was made with all active developers to make it possible to allow a 
> changing of the existing GPL/QPL dual licensing system.
> 
> After months of hard negotiations there can be no doubt that one of the 
> first commercial license takers of matroska will be the Matsushita 
> Corporation, Tokyo, Japan, chosing matroska as their main container 
> format for an upcoming proprietary blue laser DVD standard to be 
> released by Panasonic and some of their licensees on the new standard, 
> in an attempt to avoid the domination of the Windows Media Video 9 (TM) 
> standard from Micorosoft (R)  for next generations HDTV video. Panasonic 
> already announced they will use a wavelet based video codec called WARP, 
> created by the IBM video compression department around the well known 
> codec expert Mr. Toby Hudon ( performing wavelet on 512 consecutive 
> frames, and on every frame itself ), and to use the musepack audio 
> compression format ( MPC ) for audio.
> 
> I sincerely hope that all of you will see the big advantage for the 
> opensource audio and video community in undertaking this step, as from 
> now on there will be one new standard a/v container, in possession of 
> one of the biggest computer companies of the world, but fully available 
> for the community.
> 
> Best regards from Hawaii

Christian, I've thought you were a total asshole in the past, but
selling out like this is the last straw. I don't see how you can claim
it's beneficial to us for IBM to make Matroska proprietary, except
perhaps that it will keep people from using the horrible format... :)

I have no more interest in seeing oene behemoth dominate the market
with a proprietary codec (IBM with WARP) than another (MS with WMV).
In fact, I prefer WMV because it's already been reverse engineered,
whereas getting support for this new IBM mess in free software is
going to be another setback to us.

Now, please take your proprietary crap off this list, and we'll get
back to implementing formats that are superior technically and
freedom-wise. Good riddance to you.

Rich