I posted about H.264 and WebM earlier this week and this post extends that discussion to an ecosystem perspective.

The H.264 vs WebM discussion goes to the heart of how we define the term ‘standard’.  There are many interpretations of what exactly constitutes a standard, but central to the meaning of a standard is the notion of collaboration between companies and the creation of a viable ecosystem. Hence, standards are often tied to the idea of shared control and a defined governance process. Control can take many facets: the ability to contribute to the specification, the ability to change the specification, transparency etc.  People often conflate the concept of open standards and open source software and this is one area where confusion can be problematic.
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The H.264 standard has been getting a lot of press recently due to the announcement that Google will drop H.264 support from Chrome in favour of WebM, and the subsequent clarification of H.264 support from Google. In this post, we try to clarify the issue from a standards perspective and explain the complexities in the standards and open source world.

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SYNOPSIS

There is a curious paradox which we are seeing increasingly. We see closed systems built on open standards and open source. I illustrate the phenomenon giving three instances below (Apple and Facetime, Open source and the Cloud and SPDY – the proposed new protocol from Google to replace HTTP). I seek comments on these.
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A forum and debate on the topic “Intellectual Property, Open Source and Standards: Friends or Foes?” will be held at the Maastricht University Campus Brussels on June 1, 2010. Hosting the event are The Institute for Globalisation and International Regulation at the Maastricht University Faculty of Law together with the Stockholm Network Intellectual Property & Competition Programme.
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On Thursday February 25, Talkstandards hosted a lively open forum on ICT Standardization and eHealth.

Ajit Jaokar spoke of the possibility that eHealth will take off in emerging markets and what the implications thereof could be. As an illustration, Jaokar mentioned the M-Pesa mobile payment service which took off in Kenya, serving 6.5 million subscribers by May 2009
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In an exclusive interview with Talkstandards, Professor David Ingram of openEHR, one of the most innovative players in the eHealth field, outlines some of his expectations for the future of ICT in the health care sector. This transcript has been prepared from notes taken during a telephone interview on February 22nd.

Part III: Openness, implementation and governance
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In an exclusive interview with Talkstandards, Professor David Ingram of openEHR, one of the most innovative players in the eHealth field, outlines some of his expectations for the future of ICT in the health care sector. This transcript has been prepared from notes taken during a telephone interview on February 22nd.

Part II: eHealth in an international perspective
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In an exclusive interview with Talkstandards, Professor David Ingram of openEHR, one of the most innovative players in the eHealth field, outlines some of his expectations for the future of ICT in the health care sector. This transcript has been prepared from notes taken during a telephone interview on February 22nd.

Part I: The Future of eHealth
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There has been a lot of talk about the future of the Flash format especially after the launch of the iPad since both the iPad and the iPhone do not support Flash.

Like many people, I am a fan of HTML5 and recent developments in the evolution of HTML5 indicate that it will now become the technology of choice for all browser vendors. Flash is the current de-facto web standard for video.
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Recently, Google posted a much publicised memo called the Meaning of Open in which Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management attempted to define Open. Attempting to define ‘Open’ is a complex task with many contradictions, and it is good that Jonathan has attempted this.
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