LinuxGram

There is now such a thing as the WebM Community Cross-License (CCL) Initiative, which is out collecting patents presumably to protect the royalty-free open source file format and its VP8 video codec created by Google against any infringement claims made by the MPEG Licensing Association.

MPEG LA, which is forming a patent pool – and being investigated by the Justice Department for it – has maintained that “VP8 is not patent-free.”

The newborn CCL effort has so far got 17 founding members that have “agreed to license patents they may have that are essential to WebM technologies to other members of the CCL” for free.

They are identified as AMD, Cisco, Google, HiSilicon Technologies (for itself and its parent Huawei), LG, Logitech, Matroska, Mips, Mozilla, Opera, Pantech, Quanta, Samsung, STMicroelectronics and its 50-50 joint venture ST-Ericsson, TI, Verisilicon Holdings and the Xiph.org Foundation.

However, patent watcher Florian Mueller says the 17, some of which aren’t even major patent holders, are “unlikely to collectively own all the patents essential to WebM/VP8,” and that the effort “fails to address the number one issue WebM’s critics point to: the risk of infringement assertions by entities that don’t have any strategic interest in VP8.”

He couldn’t help but notice that Google buddy and Android licensee Motorola Mobility’s subsidiary General Instrument Corporation, which does own codec patents, isn’t part of the initiative, at least not yet.

See www.webm-ccl.org.

Six ambitious open source developers are forking Android.

They mean to move the Android stack – sans the litigious Dalvik and Harmony – to a legal JVM in the naïve hope of making Oracle’s suit against Google “a bad dream of the past.”

If they can pull it off without Oracle summoning its lawyers – probably a false hope – it would put Android on the desktop, any desktop. Gee, a Linux ecosystem on the desktop. Fancy that.

The project is called IcedRobot and it was just unveiled at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting held every year in Brussels.

There’s no public code yet but they’ve got a cute logo and there’s a clutch of pretty overheads at http://www.icedrobot.org/downloads/fosdem11/icedrobot-fosdem-2011-02-05.pdf that describe the “GNUlization of Android” as the “project that both Google and Oracle will love and hate.”

They’re currently decoupling Dalvik from Android’s custom kernel and mean to run it on the GPL2-licensed OpenJDK and Hotspot, the primary Java virtual machine for desktops and servers.

They figure that “if it runs in the JVM like JRuby, Jython or Clojure, there can’t be any reasonable claim anymore.”

Patent watcher Florian Mueller figures that “by integrating Java code available on GPLv2 terms they hope to be safe from legal attacks on Oracle’s part, but this depends on what exactly they do and how the implicit patent license contained in the GPLv2 would apply. The more they modify the OpenJDK code, the less likely they are to be covered by that implicit patent license.”

He figures that some of Oracle’s patents may be broader than the implicit OpenJDK patent license and that Oracle may also have patents that read on the extensions or modifications the IcedRobot team make separate from the original OpenJDK.

Having dug into the Oracle v Google Java case, Florian has little confidence that Google can mount a credible defense – let alone win – and senses that the IcedRobot developers, besides exposing Google’s anti-GPL bias, are equally skeptical of Android escaping a massive rewrite and Google escaping damages. Not, he says, the lack of confidence Google would like the open source community to have.

Anyway, setting aside for the moment the sensation that IcedRobot is rushing in where angels fear to tread, its crew anticipates three projects really: GNUDroid, a Micro Edition; GNUBishop, the Standard Edition; and Daneel, a pure Java interpreter VM for Dalvik, that may include a JIT later on.

GNUDroid would run Davlik as a standalone application on Linux x86, QNX and Mac OSX. It would be the front-end for the Linux desktop.

They imagine GNUBishop being a full OS desktop distribution like Ubuntu or Fedora with browser plug-ins for Firefox, IE, Chrome, Safari and Opera as well as a desktop application framework so applications can be install on the desktop. It would target Mac, Windows and Linux and replace the Dalvik runtime with OpenJDK, relying on Daneel, the bridge between Dalvik and OpenJDK, for its core VM.

Nothing if not complete, the project also imagines a GNU AppBazaar for buying and selling IcedRobot apps that would help fund the project’s further development with a tithe of 10% of the proceeds going to the Free Software Foundation (FSF). It also foresees, should it get this far, untargeted ads promoting IcedRobot applications that don’t collect information about the user.

Icedrobot.org isn’t quite working yet. Stay tuned.

See http://www.jroller.com/neugens/entry/introducing_icedrobot and http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/02/alien-dalvik-and-icedrobot-can-they-run.html.

Google’s got a special new version of its standard Premier Edition Google Apps that’s supposed to meet basic toe-in-the-door government security requirements.

Well, at least the data generated by the government’s use of Gmail and calendaring will be segregate from everybody else’s cloud-borne data on servers located in the continental US. Other apps will eventually be segregated too.

In this Google’s aping Microsoft’s BPOS Federal (BPOS-F), its Business Productivity Online Suite for the government.

Google’s billing the widgetry as Google Apps for Government and saying that pushing government large and small into its cloud will save taxpayer dollars that otherwise go to pay licensing fees and maintenance. Like Google Apps for the rest of us it costs $50 a seat per year.

Google has won over Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and has pilots running the government-grade Apps at maybe dozen other agencies.

It’s been pitching its e-mail to the General Services Administration (GSA), the influential 15,000-seat agency that oversees government procurement, up against Microsoft, and the GSA has just certified Gmail and Google Apps word processing as secure enough for generic federal use, stuff that may be sensitive but not classified.

Microsoft is bidding its $120-a-seat-per-year web-based Exchange widgetry and expects to get the same minimal Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification for its BPOS-F, which naturally includes Exchange Online.

Ninety percent of the federal government already uses Exchange for e-mail according to the Wall Street Journal. The GSA uses IBM’s Lotus Notes.

Ironically, Google flubbed its June 30 deadline to lift the City of Angels’ e-mail into the cloud, a closely watched five-year marquee project that it’s getting paid $7.25 million to pull off, its largest government contract so far.

Some 20,000 of LA’s 34,000 workers will have to shift for themselves for a while longer on the town’s decrepit Novell Groupwise platform and Google will have to shrug off the embarrassment.

Google beat out Microsoft for the contract last October but has encountered an LAPD roadblock in how the cops’ want their data secured, if not segregated, requirements that were supposedly clear from the beginning. Other agencies have had performance complaints.

Until Google resolves the issues, the city is going to be paying for both systems at a potential added cost of $147,000 a quarter according to the LA Times – or it would be if Google and CSC, its integrator, hadn’t just agreed to absorb the difference at least until November, when the system is now supposed to be completely installed. Additional cost overruns are reportedly still being negotiated.

Google is downplaying the fact that it may have bit off more than it can chew. It would have preferred to do a bunch of smaller municipal installations first but fate decreed otherwise.

The Times quoted a council member as saying, “Google comes in with this sweetheart deal that was supposed to be state-of-the-art – supposed to make wonders – and obviously they haven’t performed.” The city council is supposed to review Google’s contract performance next week. The deal is supposed to save the city $5.5 million.

Google says on its web site that it took guidance from the cities of Los Angeles and Orlando in coming up with Google Apps for Government. It claims “most agencies we have worked with have found that Google Apps provides at least equivalent, if not better, security than they have today. This means government customers can move to the cloud with confidence.”

It reckons Washington spends $76 billion a year on IT, and state and local governments spend $56 billion.

Google fired a shot across Apple’s bow Wednesday and considering the way things have been going Apple will probably seek to return fire in the not-too-distant future with an armor-piercing lawsuit.

The latest fray started when Google got up at the Google I/O developers conference – like it was widely expected to do – and open sourced VP8, the video codec it got when it acquired On2 Technologies, the video compression house, in February for about $125 million.

VP8 will try to displace H.264, the proprietary codec that Apple and Microsoft are invested in.

VP8 is now part of a thing called the WebM project, which also includes the open source Ogg Vorbis audio format, and a container format based on a subset of the open source Matroska multimedia container.

Needless to say, WebM is royalty-free and already has the support of the majority of the browser community: the Mozilla Foundation’s open source Firefox browser, which Google still supports financially, Opera, Google’s own Chrome and at the last minute Microsoft’s upcoming Internet Explorer 9, due in, oh, say, 2011.

Well, at least it will allow playback if users install the codec themselves and Ars Technica thinks that’s to avoid any patent problems like IBM and Linux. Microsoft is sticking with H.264 otherwise.

What Microsoft’s gonna do about VP8’s implicit challenge to Silverlight may turn out to be a horse of another color.

Given its high-profile falling out with Apple Abode’s also promising to support VP8 in its proprietary and ubiquitous Flash, which would bring the widgetry to IE and Safari users despite what Microsoft and Apple might do. Otherwise, Flash is widely regarded as a dead man walking.

Google also means to create WebM plug-ins for QuickTime and DirectShow and has set Android support for the so-called Gingerbread release planned for Q4

H.264 lives at MPEG LA, a licensing operation in Denver that collects royalties for the patent pools it represents. Both Microsoft and Apple have IP in H.264, but H.264 (which is on its way to becoming H.265) is free for browsers to use for the next five years. After that the royalty picture is supposed to change.

It is widely considered likely that VP8 may infringe on H.264 patents and, if not H.264, then somebody else’s.

In a recent widely disseminated e-mail exchange Apple CEO Steve Jobs reminded Free Software Foundation Europe executive Hugo Roy that “All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other ‘open source’ codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on other patents. An open standard is different from being royalty-free or open source.”

Google offers no indemnification for using its widgetry (doing so would be like painting a great big bull’s-eye on its back) so Apple (and perhaps the Hollywood set since VP8 doesn’t support DRM) could bide its time and pick off one of the weaker sisters like it’s evidently trying to do by suing HTC for Android patent infringement.

Naturally Google is taking the position that it doesn’t infringe apparently because earlier versions of the thing were never called to account. It may not even know whether it does or not.

There’s a side-by-side comparison of H.264 and VP8 at www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/First-Look-H.264-and-VP8-Compared-67266.aspx which concludes that H.264 “offers better quality, but the difference wouldn’t be noticeable in most applications.”

Google claims that “VP8’s efficient bandwidth usage will mean lower serving costs for content publishers and high-quality video for end users. The codec’s relative simplicity makes it easy to integrate into existing environments and requires less manual tuning to produce high-quality results. These existing attributes and the rapid innovation we expect through the open development process make VP8 well suited for the unique requirements of video on the web.”

A developer preview of WebM and VP8 including APIs, source code, specs and encoding tools is available at www.webmproject.org.

Google admits the widgetry is incomplete and hogs processor resources but it expects better visual quality and optimized performance in a pending official release. GPU acceleration may bee off in the distance; ARM, AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom and Qualcomm are supporting WebM.

The current VP8 spec is final.

Digital video expert Jason Garrett-Glaser, however, calls the spec “imprecise, unclear and overly short,” “a pile of copy-pasted C code” that’s nowhere ready for prime time. He also told tgdaily it copies a lot from H.264, “way too much for anyone sane to be comfortable with it no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free.”

For its part Google is already lacing YouTube videos larger than 720p with VP8 and YouTube is supposed to represent 40% of the video on the Internet. It’s still using Flash too.

VP8 is governed by a new Google-made BSD-style license so it can be used in both proprietary and open source software. It does not require that code changes be open sourced. It grants patent rights that terminate if patent litigation is filed against VP8 or its children. The license hasn’t been submitted to OSI.

Gosh, isn’t Google’s timing grand. In a few weeks Microsoft’s web-based versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint will start wending their way to market. So Google, which is going to be technically outclassed, decides to drop a re-architected Google Apps public preview Monday that’s faster and chummier than what exists, collaboration supposedly being Google App’s strong suit.

The changes – it apparently took Google a year to get the new functionality to work in a browser –are supposed to make its cloud apps perform more like traditional desktop apps.

Google also reminded users that it’s going to turn off Google Gears on May 3 so they won’t be able to use Google Apps off-line for the foreseeable future.

It’s going to replace Gears with HTML 5 at some point it’s just not clear when. Google claims not that many people use the vaunted feature.

It’s also dropping support for older browsers that have slower rendering engines and don’t support the new functionality.

The various Google Apps, which all had different fathers, will now apparently share a common infrastructure.

Google has made real-time collaboration possible. Kinda like Google Wave users can now see editing changes as they’re typed character-by-character, with comments coming in over an integrated instant messenger. The widgetry will support 50 simultaneous editors, which we predict will not make it a productivity tool.

Microsoft’s competitive apps are not supposed to have real-time multi-user editing.

Google, however, has tried to make Google Apps more Microsoft-like. Docs now supports formatting options like a margin ruler, better numbering and bullets, better image placement and spell-checking as you type.

Spreadsheets have gotten a formula editing bar, cell auto-complete and drag-and-drop columns.

Uploading files to the cloud is also supposed to be easier with imported documents looking the same as they do on the desktop despite the browser used. Their formatting used to lack any uniformity.

To solve that problem Google designed its own document object model and built a new JavaScript layout engine that converts the formatting into the HTML that supported browsers like Chrome, Safari or Firefox can read consistently.

There’s also a new standalone Drawing app, which is something of a misnomer. It’s not an Etch-a-Sketch like the name implies; it’s for building PowerPoint-like flow charts, schematics and other kinds of diagrams. And it too has multi-user editing capabilities. The drawings are said to be easy to insert in a document with the text automatically flowing around them. IE users will need IE9 when it finally arrives.

Mobile Android, iPhone and Blackberry users will be able to edit spreadsheets but just read documents.

To use the preview Google Apps customers have to set the control panel option to “enable new pre-release features,” enable the new document editor in the “Document settings” page, and activate the new spreadsheet editor with the “New version” link at the top of any spreadsheet.

The update was introduced at Google’s new cloud conference for CIOs called Atmosphere.

Microsoft’s online applications are supposed to be available to business users next month and to the hoi-polloi in June.