Raleigh, NC
Travis Kepley is a Senior Instructor at Red Hat where he helps employees, partners and customers understand how Open Source Software can create a better IT and business infrastructure. Travis started at Red Hat in January of 2008 as a Technical Support Engineer before becoming a Solutions Architect prior to moving to his current role. Travis graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and now lives in Raleigh with his wife and dog. When not extolling the virtues of open source, Travis is found fishing as well as playing and recording music.
Authored Comments
Open standards that can be used, developed upon and implemented by anyone are tantamount to fixing the broken web. Imagine if everyone standardized on a closed source html version that required licensing and patent agreements to use? Well, we saw this when IE ruled the roost. Lack of innovation, inability to run other browsers without serious problems and active-x hacks that compromised entire datacenters.
You mention the divide, however you must remember that Firefox and Chrome hold a considerable amount of the marketplace and both support Theora. I doubt you'll see much more than perhaps Apple's websites fully on h.264.
The fact that a startup could be hindered by the licensing costs of h.264 that are not guaranteed to stay the same year after year, nor clamp down on the restrictions is enough to make it not worth our time. Forget the divide, open standards close the divide. We have seen this time and again...
Great points, and I love OGG too, but I don't see a problem with other formats (even closed formats) as long as the methods of getting those to play are open. No plugins, anyone can interface and play. That's my biggest hope for now.
As for IE, it didn't stop Firefox from taking over. I remember several corporate sites who said 'our site works best with firefox' with a link. And in the interim, couldn't we have choice? In the end that's all I think any open fan hopes for. So why not run flash and HTML5? It's better for everyone in the long run, OGG and others will get better at compression the more people use it.
Thanks for the comments!