Many of you have probably already heard that Cisco plans to publish a gratis binary implementation of an H.264 codec (encode and decode). Most importantly, Cisco is picking up the MPEG-LA tab of $6.5m/yr. If you missed it, here’s the announcement: http://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/open-source-h-264-removes-barriers-webrtc/
The LWN comment linked below (if legit; I’m not sure who “gerv” is) reveals a lot of goodwill. They’re planning it to be open source with deterministic builds, so the risk of a backdoor in the binary blob is near zero. The patent risk prevents it from being actually libre software, but it’s as close as they can get while staying with the MPEG rules.
Monty Montgomery of Xiph has some deeper insights than I’d come up with on my own: http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/61927.html
Aha, “gerv” appears to be Gerv Markham a mozilla.org staff member. So likely quite legit.
Hadn’t heard. Interesting!