Federico Pistono

I report verbatim an article from the standblog which represents perfectly what I think is the future of video and how should the web be: Open Source, open minded, multiplatform, easy, fast and cool.

For years, digital video has been soaring, just like still digital images 15 years earlier. It's now easy to capture video, editing it is now possible thanks to user-friendly applications and with broadband becoming more common, the pipes are now big enough to download video. The only caveat is that Web browsers have not evolved over time to include video, because the dominant browser vendor had little reason to invest in it. Proprietary plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime or Windows Media have been until now the only way for Web developers to include video in their Web application. Unfortunately, resorting to proprietary plug-ins and patented codecs has drawbacks.

Why, why do you keep choosing closed source, proprietary solutions instead of OSS, as if you could not make money out of it (wrong!).

Hey, Apple, BBC, RAI, Microsoft, Adobe and all the others like you, I'm talking to you!

Open Source Software is usually more reliable, flexible and stable than its closed source counterpart, typically built on standards and most of the times (with rare exceptions) even works better. So why do you keep choosing closed expensive stupid-closed-source software?

Aaron Seigo gives a very interesting overview of why should we and particularly companies and governments use open formats. In the technological era we are not able to read a document that is 5 or 10 years old, but we are well able to read books that are hundreds of years old. This paradox is due to wrong choices of using proprietary formats, which can only slow down our collective knowledge and put barriers to our communication.